Debian MIPS port
Hi,
I am new to this list, but not to Debian in general, having used it for
several years now - though only on x86.
I am seriously considering running the Debian MIPS port on a proprietary
piece of HW containing an R3000A-compatible CPU (incl. MMU), Flash,
DRAM, Ethernet and a serial port. No disks (floppy/hard), no CD-ROM, no
keyboard, no mouse, no display adapter, no nothing - but that's gonna be
my problem :-)
I have a question about the Debian/MIPS port ("mips", as I prefer
running big-endian): which MIPS ISA are the binaries compiled for?
My R3000A executes only the MIPS ISA I (32 bit), but later extension are
MIPS ISA II (also 32 bit), MIPS ISA III/IV/V (64 bit), MIPS-32 (well, 32
bit) and MIPS-64 (well, 64 bit), ... Since all (most?) MIPS CPUs are
backward compatible with the MIPS ISA I, a binary compiled for this
version would actually execute on all MIPS CPUs, albeit probably
performance-wise sub-optimal on some architectures.
As I am new to looking at the Debian/MIPS port, and the port itself is
only from the 3.0 release, I have to ask a question about the viability
of this port. Is the port "alive", is it reasonable stable, are new
packages being ported (soon after release...), and are most packages
actually working?
Thanks for any feedback on this. I would love to run Linux on my box,
and it appears the Debian is the only tier-one distribution supporting
many different architectures - including MIPS - one of the good reasons
I stick to Debian in general.
Regards,
Claus
Denmark
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