On Wed, Feb 01, 2012 at 03:56:33PM -0800, David Daney wrote: > Hi, Hi,
> We (Cavium, Inc.) are interested in working with one or more people > to create a MIPS 64 port of Debian. As part of the effort, we can > make available one or more fairly high end machines. These would be > cn5650 (12 CPU SMP) based, or similar, with 4GB of RAM and a large > SATA disk. > > See: http://cavium.com/OCTEON-Plus_CN56XX.html > > These are running unmodified Linux 3.2 kernels with mips/Squeeze > installed and at first would be big-endian only. > > We can also run little-endian in the future, but we are interested > in attacking the big-endian problem first. > I think Debian would be interested in having a 64-bit MIPS port, but the main problem is to have enough people interested and providing manpower. The current mips and mipsel ports are not in a very good state, and are already lacking manpower to fix the existing issues. That's why this part is important, and it would be difficult to convince the release team and the community in general to add a 3rd mips(el) port if the already existing ones are not well maintained. About the n32 port, I have to say I am not sure it's a good idea to go for 32-bit nowadays. As far as I know n32 is still limited to a 2GB memory space, and this already causes some issues in Debian. More and more code reaches this limit (including GCC), issuing the now famous "Virtual memory space exhausted". IMHO architectures with a 2GB memory space will have a very limited life in Debian, that's why for example the s390 port is being replaced by the s390x port. Architecture with 4GB memory space can probably live a bit longer though. So if a new MIPS port is created, I really advise to create a full 64-bit port. -- Aurelien Jarno GPG: 1024D/F1BCDB73 [email protected] http://www.aurel32.net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
