Re: Help with some mips machines
Kapil Hari Paranjape wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I found the following machines lying idle at our Institute (shocking,
> I know!).
>
> Power Challenge L
> IP21 firmware
> 2 R8000 at 90 Mhz
> 2 GB disk
> 256 MB RAM
The power challenge is completely unsupported by Linux. (Implementing
R8000 support would be the first step to change that).
> Origin 200 (2 Towers)
> 4 R10000 at 180 Mhz
> 2 GB disk
> 2 x 256 MB RAM
The O200 needs a small-ish out-of tree kernel patch to work around
some PCI quirkyness. There is currently no Debian kernel for this
machine.
> I would like to put some work on these machines *if* they can be
> used fruitfully (with some addition of disk capacity perhaps) in
> order to build packages for Debian (possibly as part of the build
> infrastructure).
Just to give an idea about performance, the main build machines are
Broadcom SWARMs: 800 MHz dualcore, at least 512 MB RAM (2GB would
be better, some package builds need that much memory). The O200 could
make a nice system for developers to check out their packages on a
mips system.
> If so, then I would like to know if someone can tell me where I can
> look for hints on getting a Linux kernel to boot on these machines.
> The current Debian images do not seem to work (and probably should
> not since these are for different firmware versions!). I have tried
> to build a kernel for IP27 under qemu but not too hard --- so if that
> is a bad approach please let me know!
For kernel builds it is easier to use a crosscompiler. I made some
packages from the Debian compiler sources, they are at
http://people.debian.org/~ths/toolchain
I think Julien Blache eperimented with an O200 a while ago, maybe
he has some more information.
For mips kernel questions the best place to ask is
linux-mips@linux-mips.org.
Thiemo
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