Gentoo/MIPS: Notes for upcomming release 2008.0

Well… since 2007.1 got cancelled, officially, it was decided that 2008.0 would be much earlier than usual to compensate.

A few days ago I had my O2 busy compiling big endian stages — these were based on the cancelled 2007.1 snapshot,  and I compiled them to ensure that we, as an architecture team, didn’t slip too far behind. Those who are doing fresh installs onto MIPS4-based SGI hardware, may wish to look here.  Note that while they are labelled as “2007.1”, they are not official release media for that release.

At present, I’m building seed stages for the 2008.0 release for both big and little endian, and should start on proper stages shortly after a 2008.0 profile is added to the tree.

Due to a lack of manpower, the MIPS port of Gentoo is moving back to being an experimental architecture.  This means, starting with 2008.0, profiles will accept ~mips keywords.  There won’t be any keywords dropped on mass, the plan is we’ll just gradually let the stable keywords disappear over time (the ones that are there, stay, we won’t add any new ones).   Present users may wish to consider setting ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=”~mips” in their make.conf files if they have not done so already.  As always, any breakage, please report it.

The Loongson LiveUSB image that I mentioned earlier — is still in the pipeline.  It too, is marked 2007.1 as it was built with those stages.  It consists of a 870MB SquashFS image, which gets loaded from a netboot kernel.  The first netboot image for Loongson is now available, you’ll find it, and a rough guide on how to boot it on my devspace.  I haven’t put the LiveUSB image itself on my site yet, as it’s a whopper, and I suspect the Infrastructure team will rightfully frown on me distributing it from there.  It’s presently sitting in the staging area waiting to be pushed out to mirrors.  I’ll let you all know when this happens.