Re: Dropping mips architecture for bullseye and sid

[Mathieu Malaterre <mathieu.malaterre@gmail.com>]

Salut Aurélien !

On Sat, Jul 20, 2019 at 12:47 PM Aurelien Jarno <aurel32@debian.org> wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
> The mips architecture, supporting 32-bit big-endian MIPS CPUs, has
> been supported in Debian for more than 15 years. Due to the limited 2GB
> virtual address space and due to the fact this architecture is one of
> the last big-endian architecture Debian supports, the porting effort
> is increasingly difficult. On the other hand the interest for this
> architecture is going down, and with it the human resources available
> for porting is going down.

Thanks for your dedication these last years.

> Now that buster has been released, it is probably time to drop this
> architecture from bullseye and sid. Unless there is a sudden interest
> for this architecture, that is commitment from some new porters and new
> hardware for the build daemons, the plan is to ask for the ftpmasters
> to drop this architecture in about 4 weeks.

In other words, mips is not going to debian-ports ?

> Note that many recent
> MIPS hardware support endian switching at runtime and can therefore be
> supported by the mipsel or mips64el ports. This is the case for example
> of the Octeon CPUs.
>
> Note that this *only concerns bullseye and sid*. The mips architecture
> will still be available for stretch for roughly 1 more year, and for
> buster for roughly 3 more years.
>
> Aurelien, on behalf of the MIPS porters
>
> --
> Aurelien Jarno                          GPG: 4096R/1DDD8C9B
> aurelien@aurel32.net                 http://www.aurel32.net



-- 
Mathieu