MIPS port maintenance (debian-installer, kernel)
We need more people actively testing debian-installer and the kernel
on various MIPS (mips and mipsel) platforms. I've tested d-i and the
kernel on various MIPS platforms over the last years, even platforms I
wasn't terribly interested in myself. I no longer have the time or
interest to maintain platforms I'm not interested in, so I'm asking
other people to step up.
Let's look at what is supported at the moment and who could do some
testing:
r4k-ip22 (SGI Indy): this platform broke with every new kernel version
in the past but Thomas Bogendoerfer is now maintaining the kernel
upstream and he is very responsive. Still, we need people to test the
Debian kernel (and report issues upstream) and to test d-i on a
regular basis. Florian Lohoff has done some kernel tests recently, so
I hope he can continue with that and also do d-i tests on a regular
basis.
r5k-ip32 (SGI O2): I gave Thomas Bogendoerfer an O2 a few months ago,
so upstream kernel maintenance is taken care of. Giuseppe Sacco has
done some d-i tests but I think we need additional people because
Giuseppe doesn't have enough time. Anyone interested?
sb1-bcm91250a (SWARM): not many people have such a development board.
I hope Karsten Merker can do some regular tests and maybe Thiemo can
do some too. Hopefully Thiemo will fix kernel support upstream.
sb1a-bcm91480b (BigSur): same here; in fact, I'm wondering whether we
should remove kernel and d-i support; at least d-i support doesn't
work because we don't use ramdisks on MIPS. Comments?
4kc-malta/5kc-malta (Malta, qemu): Aurelien Jarno is in charge of
these platforms and I hope he'll continue to test and fix them.
r5k-cobalt (Cobalt): I'm happy to continue testing Cobalt, but I only
have access to a RaQ2 at the moment. It would be great if other
people could test RaQ1 (Karsten?) and Qube 2700 (who?).
What needs to be done exactly?
First, we need to make sure that new kernels work on all these
platforms. Since most MIPS platforms are not used much, they often
break when a new upstream kernel is released. I will make kernel
snapshots available for testing and post a mail to this list asking
people to upgrade to these snapshots and report issues.
Second, debian-installer needs to be tested on a regular basis.
Thiemo makes daily installer images available for mips and mipsel
at http://people.debian.org/~ths/d-i/mips/images/daily/
and http://people.debian.org/~ths/d-i/mipsel/images/daily/
Please test these daily images on a regular basis.
I will try to post a call for testers when a beta release is in
progress, but we also need some people to regularly test d-i on their
platform of choice on their own.
I think it's also clear from the list of people above that we need to
get more MIPS users actively involved in testing and bug fixing. If
you use Debian on MIPS, please help by testing kernel snapshots and
daily d-i images. If you are interested in helping with the MIPS port
but don't have any MIPS hardware, please contact me privately and I'll
see what I can do.
--
Martin Michlmayr
http://www.cyrius.com/
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