On Wed, 6 May 2020, Vincent Legoll wrote:
Hello,
In the intervening years, interest faded away as free software friendly
MIPS hardware became more rare.
I grabbed a gnubee during the crowdfunding campaign, but the CPU
is too low spec to do a lot of compilation on it.
I also have a gnubee, and would love to be able to put Guix on it.
However, so far I haven't put much time into getting it working. It would
certainly be more fun to work on it with others :)
My impression is that the the gnubee is a different class of MIPS than the
current port. I think that the gnubee is a SoC that is is targeted at home
routers and is 32-bit, while the current port is 64-bit and targeted at
chips like the longsoon. Is that correct?
There seems to be a a fair amount of the router-class hardware available
that works with Free Software, but not much, if any, of the latter, more
powerful hardware. Unfortunately, I think having the more powerful
hardware available would make it much easier to work on the port.
[…]
What do people think?
I may not be able to put huge time in it so won't ask you to keep it
just for me.
I'll restart working / trying things in the foreign archs area after my
list of pending things is drained a bit (guix-install.sh & tarball CI,
native-inputs lint warning chasing) but that's only wishful thinking
for now.
I feel similarly. It's always sad to see things go (I used to have a
collection of SPARC hardware, but let it go when I moved a few years ago),
but no need to keep it just for me.
Vincent, it sounds like there are at least two of us. Maybe we can work
together.
Best,
Jack
