Gentoo/MIPS Update
Thursday, December 18th, 2008Hi all… figured I better update everyone on what’s happening on the MIPS front.
Kumba has been working on newer kernel ebuilds to support various platforms, specifically IP30, which has been troublesome of late. At present, the best kernel revision to use is still 2.6.23 on Cobalt, Loongson 2E and O2.
Another alternative, is to download your own kernels from the Linux/MIPS website (not kernel.org), and research the patches needed to get things running yourself… in fact… Lemote Loongson 2E, Cobalt Qube2 and SGI Indy/O2 users should find minimal to no patching is necessary as the vast majority of changes have already been accepted into the mainline kernel.
Stages… there have been no further stages built at the moment from the 2008.0 ones. Partly because some of us have been just too busy. I’ve started to make inroads into a uClibc-based set of stages however, having got a uClibc-0.9.30 toolchain built the other day targetted at mipsel-unknown-linux-uclibc. It is hoped a workable environment can be constructed in the coming months that may turn into a new set of stages available for this platform.
Desktop Applications… have been lagging quite a bit. I have some patches for Thunderbird 2.0 that gets things rolling again… and may just work for big-endian MIPS (which was broken at last check) but due to lack of time, I haven’t been able to investigate further. A similar set of patches got Firefox 3.0 partially working… more work needs to be done.
My own status… I’m not planning on leaving anytime soon… just been extremely busy. As it is now, I’m passed my 8:00PM bed time (need to be up at 4:00AM tomorrow, currently it is 8:35PM AEST), so I’ll leave it at that.