On Thu, Mar 18, 1999 at 11:25:46AM -0600, Russell E Glaue wrote: [snip]
The little endain MIPS version of Linux works very good, it's just the Deskstation Tyne model which isn't support, not because the processor isn't supported but because none of the kernel developers has such a machine. I've heard from Ralf Baechle that he had such a machine, and therefore there has been support for this machine, but unfortunately his machine didn't boot anylonger a couple of years ago and therefore no one has had the oppertunity to maintain the port to Deskstation Tyne. As the kernel development goes on you break stuff and if you don't fix them they'll remain broken (and myths become to legends which are since long forgotten when..). Well anyway, I think that's what happend to the Tyne. The problem is not that the processor isn't supported, almost all the MIPS processors are supported, even those which run in little endian (the MIPS port was as far as I know initiated for little endain machines). All you will need to do is probably to get the Deskstation Tyne specific hardware running, e.g. the interrupt handler, the prom code and the device drivers. That shouldn't be hard to do once you have the machine in your hands if you're a kernel hacker. :) By the way, look here to find a mipsel kernel binary: ftp://ftp.linux.sgi.com/pub/linux/mips/mipsel-linux/boot And look here to find a complete mipsel redhat distribution: ftp://ftp.linux.sgi.com/pub/linux/mips/mipsel-linux/RPMS (of course that kernel doesn't include Deskstation Tyne support, but it's still little endain mips and you can run those RPMs once you get the kernel up and running... I think) I think there are RPM binaries of cross compilation tools as well somewhere. - Ulf
