Gentoo 2008.0 final stages uploaded
I’m pleased to annouce the final 2008.0 stages have been published. I haven’t yet gotten around to giving them a run, I’ll set up a couple of chroots and do some test builds shortly, but in the meantime, I have put them up on my devspace for public review.
As previously announced, this release sees the addition of generic MIPS-1 stages for both big and little endian, as well as new stages for little-endian MIPS-3. We still only support the hardware listed in the handbook however — the generic stages are provided merely as a convenience to those who may wish to experiment with other hardware, and know what they’re doing.
Approximately 1.2GB got uploaded over the 30 or so hours… this is apparent from my NTP server’s performance this weekend:
… Yeah… I think I’ll wait until I’m back at uni before I upload any more big files. 
Anyway… as I say, the new stages are up, and I’d be greatful if some brave users could take them for a spin and report back. In the meantime, I’ve got some chroots to set up and testing to do.
June 17th, 2008 at 3:13 am
So are there any plans for getting Loongson instructions and support into mainstream gentoo mips (FWIW)? Just curious…
June 17th, 2008 at 9:54 pm
Ultimately yes… I hope to get Loongson support into the tree.
The kernel already JustWorks… and I now provide some crude installation media for Loongson, so this is a start.
The next step is to get the X related patches in the tree. The thing is — I do not want to break SGI systems… as yet I haven’t had the chance to test the patches on SGI kit to confirm whether everything works or not.
I provide them in an overlay, git://git.longlandclan.yi.org/overlay.git has them. There’s also the Gentoo CN overlay that Zhang Le (r0bertz) maintains — which also has lots of other packages patched to work on MIPS. (I’ve deliberately kept my overlay minimal in that regard.)
Once that is done, I should put the install notes into the docs. There’s still things I’ve got to nut out … for instance how to get BOOTP working, how to load a kernel from FAT32, etc. At the moment my notes rely on the presence of an EXT3 partition when booting from USB, or being able to configure the network statically.
So yes… I do plan to get official support going… but due to Real Life(tm), this is a slow process.
December 15th, 2008 at 8:03 pm
hi,
what is the latest linux kernel successfully running on sgi/octane2 ?
here I am still running 2.6.17
let me know any progress