Redhatter’s Web Blog

Hi All…

Just figured I’d bring you all up to date on how the new release is coming along. At this time, all little-endian MIPS builds are complete… and the big-endian builds are nearing their completion, with the MIPS3 BE build expected to be completed in a few hours. Only MIPS4 BE remains.

A number of users have had issues with the beta stages that I released earlier, in particular, there are known oddities with rsync and rm. These oddities arise when an old kernel (<2.6.19) is used. You’ll want at least kernel 2.6.20, preferably 2.6.22 or 2.6.23 running on the machine to use these stages.

Using the existing netboot images, you should still be able to at least set the disk up, extract the contents, then boot a precompiled kernel that’s sufficiently recent. How do you get the kernel? Well, for an up-to-date kernel, your easiest bet is to cross-compile. On a fast box (x86, AMD64… whatever), install genkernel, then use the command genkernel -t mips64-unknown-linux-gnu -S1 (or mips64el, or use mips/mipsel for a 32-bit compiler) to generate the cross compiler. Then use ebuild /path/to/mips-sources-VERSION.ebuild unpack to unpack a copy of the sources to your PORTAGE_TMPDIR (/var/tmp/portage by default). Then follow the instructions in the handbook as per normal, specifying CROSS_COMPILE=mips64-unknown-linux-gnu- (or mips64el…) when running make.

To get the kernel modules onto the machine, run make modules_install INSTALL_MOD_PATH=/somewhere, then tar these up. Then from the SGI box, use scp inside the chroot to download them, and unpack into /. Use the same procedure to fetch the vmlinux (or vmlinux.32) binary from your build host.

I’ve put up a new netboot image for Cobalt, although I’ve noticed 2.6.23 mips-sources has some stability issues with Cobalt, so I may yet put up another netboot image. Lemote users should find the existing images are sufficiently recent to run these stages, so I haven’t worried about putting newer images up for that platform. I’m not sure how the big-endian netboot images are constructed, so at this time, I’m not able to provide images for these platforms. (Plus, I can only test R4k IP22, IP28 or RM5k2 IP32… my Octane is dead for now.)

I hope to be uploading some material in a fortnight’s time for you to all try out.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 24th, 2008 at 7:34 pm and is filed under Gentoo Development, Linux Development, Public Syndication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.