On Fri, 1 Sep 2000, Pete Popov wrote: > The mips3/4 cpus currently supported are supported in 32 bit mode; I've > never tried the mip64 port myself ... and I'm not sure what the above > mentioned concern is.
I've since found out that mips64 is still in progress and not quite "ready for primetime", so I'll leave that issue behind for now. > I think I just changed my mind about the mips ISA support :-) Currently, > it appears that the Indys and Indigo2s are the "best" supported SGI > systems. However, mips is much more than just SGI. There are many > companies using mips cores for building SOCs, and mips32 is one of the > popular cores. In the embedded market, mips has a very strong presence, > and embedded linux is the future (please note that my opinion is highly > biased in that regard). So, I think it would be great to bring the > toolchain up to date, including mips 1/2 support. There is some very cool > mips hardware coming down the pipeline and, as I said, having an up to > date mips isa 1 and 2 (as well as 3 and 4) support would be great. Good point. I was wondering what the market was for MIPS outside of SGI. I knew there were other computers based on MIPS processors, but wasn't sure about the embedded market and what iterations of mips processors that they used. > I think so. It has an entire chapter on "Complete Guide to the MIPS > Instruction Set", plus a chapter on assembler programming, an other > chapter on c mips programming, etc. It brings the entire mips history > and architecture together in one book and covers pretty much everything > (including the caches, tlbs, floating point, etc). You might still want > to get the mips ISA specs from MIPS, but definitely do get this book. Sounds like a must-buy :-) I'll look into it shortly then. Thanks for the info! > Sorry for uneducated question, but you seem to be involved heavily in > gcc/binutils? Yes and no. I'm currently the binutils maintainer for Debian and also the de-facto port leader for Debian-Alpha, so dealing with the toolchain is a frequent exercise for me. A couple of us are also porting HURD over to Alpha, so it's become even more of a task lately :-) I try to keep my input on binutils and gcc at a minimum (since many of the active binutils/gcc developers know far more than I ever will), but I do assert myself from time to time. C
