Hi DSA, all.
I'd like to respond to your call for help regards the release qualification matrix, in particular for hardware (buildd and porter machines), and in particular for mips and mipsel arch.
I wish to work with you to remedy some of the listed issues. I've started working with MIPS hardware vendors on availability and pricing of hardware.
Having researched your current mips/mipsel setup and the requirements for jessie, the issues as I see them, and hopefully solutions, are:
1) reliability. Corelli and Gabrielli are unstable. I saw the thread way back where they were investigated, but it seems un-fixable (and the machines are now rather old). Let's work on replacing both of those, and maybe Lucatelli as well, as it appears to be the same hardware (but possibly stable?).
2) supportability. We'll work on this to see what the options are. I'm sure we all want boxes that can be maintained/replaced easily.
3) speed. I see 'mips' (but not mipsel in particular) listed as 'too slow'. Sure, Can somebody point me at some indication of the minimum requirement here (not that I'm particularly aiming at the minimum, I just wish to ensure we reach it :-). And, is this just pure single-multi-core/thread-machine speed, or is it a solvable problem by using multiple machines if necessary ?
4) I see there is a note about an 'opcode implementation error' for a mipsel porter box. Sounds like a new machine(s) is needed there as well. Could somebody point me at some data on the opcode issue (more out of interest really...).
From the three types of machines I see you currently have I believe there are more modern versions of all of those, and possibly some others. I believe we will be able to locate hardware to solve the issues.
Thanks,
Graham
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Software Design Manager, MIPS platforms
Imagination Technologies