Re: Debian/MIPSeb: proposal to drop mipseb port?
On Sat, Jul 21, 2018 at 12:18 PM J.P.Malhado <malhado@imperial.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 9 Jul 2018 18:13:43 +0800, YunQiang Su wrote:
> > We need some more build machines, current we use some ER8s,
> > which use NFS as rootfs and they have no FPU.
> > So the performance and stability are bad.
>
> I'm commenting here from a position of ignorance:
> Would SGI hardware make good build machines for the architecture? I'm asking
> because I have a 3 SGI Octanes I could give away.
Doubtful. Octanes use hundreds of watts and aren't very fast compared
with modern systems. They are indeed big endian, however.
Debian used to have some Broadcom SWARM (BCM91250A) systems. They're
bootable as big or little endian (controllable with a jumper on the
motherboard). I have some that I attempt to use for Gentoo, but
they're unstable and their kernel support seems to be totally
unmaintained.
Aurelien, do you know what happened to those systems? I don't see them
listed here: https://wiki.debian.org/MIPSPort#Build_daemons_.26_porter_boxes
(Gentoo would love your hand-me-downs if you're no longer using them :)
> Last I checked, stretch kernels did not work on these machines, but I would like
> to be wrong.
> Is the problem with the linux port, or is it related with Debian's compilation
> options?
Lack of upstream kernel support.
> According to this information from Gentoo
> https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/MIPS/Hardware_Requirements#IP30:_Octane
> it should be semi-functional, but that information might be out of date.
The maintainer of T2 Linux (René, Cc'd) has a YouTube channel in which
he demonstrated an Octane running a modern (4.8?) kernel he had
patched. I have not seen evidence of those patches going upstream
though. As far as I know his work is in a significantly better state
than that of Joshua's (from Gentoo).
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