Purpose
The purpose of this page is to demonstrate that mips and mipsel meet the architecture recertification criteria for etch.
Availability
The architecture definition is developed by MIPS Technologies, Inc..
Implementations of the MIPS architecture are publicly available without NDAs via:
Broadcom (low and high-end CPUs)
Linksys (Range of APs and networked servers)
SGI (High end servers and workstations)
4G Systems (Small routers)
Mycable XSS1500
... and so on. MIPS Inc. maintains a list of MIPS Licensees
Developer machines
The following machines are available to developers:
casals.debian.org (mipsel) - maintained by Noah L. Meyerhans, connectivity via MIT.
vaughan.debian.org (mips) - maintained by Noah L. Meyerhans, connectivity via MIT.
Port maintainers
The Debian port is maintained by the following developers, who are familiar with arch-specific issues for this port
- Thiemo Seufer (ths) - d-i, toolchain, kernel, upstream, user support... [mips/mipsel]
- Guido Guenther (agx) - misc [mostly mips]
- Florian Lohoff (flo) - misc [mostly mips]
- Karsten Merker (merker) - DECstation support [mostly mipsel, also mips]
- Peter de Schrijver (p2) - d-i, sibyl (boot loader), kernel [mips/mipsel]
- Martin Michlmayr (tbm) - d-i, coLo (boot loader), documentation [mips/mipsel]
- Ryan Murray (rmurray) - buildd admin [mips/mipsel]
Users
The port is being actively used at the following sites:
RouterBoard sells MIPS boards and includes Debian as its OS [mipsel]
- Broadcom uses Debian internally on MIPS and they have donated several machines to Debian to support the port [mips]
MIPS Technologies tests GCC/MIPS using Debian (see debian-mips list)
Front Street Networks sells old Cobalt machines with Debian pre-installed [mipsel]
- Debian is popular on old SGI machines (in particular Indy) [mips]
Martin Michlmayr maintains a page on Debian on Cobalt and easily received "thanks" from over 50 users. This port is very popular since Debian (and now Gentoo) are the only ones to provide a modern OS for these machines. [mipsel]
PRISMIQ sells a MediaPlayer Set-Top Box, running a customized version of Debian GNU/Linux. [mipsel]
Future use:
- Many wireless APs are based on MIPS CPUs. These APs are basically full machines, usually with 32 MB RAM, 8 MB flash, USB and a 200 MHz Broadcom MIPS CPU running in little-endian mode. Joey Hess and Martin Michlmayr have indicated interest in porting Debian to these machines, running a full system off a hard drive connected to USB (see DebianWRT). A similar project done on ARM attracted significant interest from users.
Popcon indicates 10 (mips) and 8 (mipsel) users of the architecture as at 2005/10/16 but these figures are certainly not representative. The debian-mips list showed significant interest in Debian on MIPS in the last few months, in particular on Cobalt machines.
Installer
The installer is being maintained by Thiemo Seufer, Martin Michlmayr, Peter 'p2' De Schrijver, Karsten Merker and Joey Hess. It is currently working with 2.4; 2.6 is under development and getting very close. Successful installation reports are available at: ...
The installer (as of sarge) works 100% on:
- SGI Indy, Indigo2 (mips)
- Cobalt (mipsel)
- DECstation (mipsel)
- Broadcom SWARM (mips, mipsel)
We intend to support all of these sub-architectures for etch, plus some more, including:
- SGI O2 (mips) - Thiemo Seufer, Martin Michlmayr
- SGI O200 (mips) - Thiemo Seufer
- wireless APs/routers (mipsel) - Joey Hess, Martin Michlmayr
Upstream support
Upstream support is provided by:
- glibc: Codesourcery, MIPS
- gcc: MIPS, Codesourcery
- g++: MIPS, Codesourcery
- binutils: Thiemo Seufer, Codesourcery, MIPS
kernel: Linux MIPS, i.e. Ralf Baechle, Maciej W. Rozycki (both of MIPS), Thiemo Seufer (Debian) and others
- boot loader: Various, depending on the subarchitecture.
- sibyl (Broadcom, Thiemo Seufer, Peter 'p2' De Schrijver) [mips/mipsel]
- colo (Peter Horton) [mipsel]
- arcboot (Thiemo Seufer, Guido Guenther, Flo Lohoff) [mips]
- delo (Thiemo Seufer, Karsten Merker) [mipsel]
Archive coverage and Autobuilder support
The port is currently at 98.2% (mips) and 98.5% (mipsel) up to date according to the buildd stats (95% cut off)
The port has currently built 96% (mips/mipsel) of the archive according to the buildd stats (90% cut off)
Archive cleanliness
The port builds from unmodified Debian source.
Autobuilders
The following machines run buildds for the port:
ball (mipsel) - connectivity via SteveMcIntyre, buildd logs checked by Ryan Murray, adminned by SteveMcIntyre.
- rem (mips) - connectivity via Flo Lohoff, buildd logs checked by Ryan Murray, adminned by Flo Lohoff and Guido Guenther.
Both of these machines have been donated by Broadcom. They are Broadcom "SWARM"s, aka BCM91250A. The SWARM is an ATX-based system featuring a dual-core 800 MHz MIPS chip, supporting standard DDR RAM and IDE hard drives. These systems can by themselves keep up. There are several slower machines (mostly SGI on mips, LASAT on mipsel) that act as backup.
Future plans:
- Broadcom has donated 2 more SWARMs to Debian. They are hosted at OSU and are currently waiting for some hard drives and more RAM. The DPL has already approved these expenses and this hardware has been ordered on 2005-10-12. These machines will have a dual-core 800 MHz CPU, 768MB or 1.2GB RAM, and a 80 GB hard drive.
- Broadcom has agreed to donate 2 more machines later in 2005 or at the beginning of 2006. These machines will be hosted at a different place to OSU to provide full buildd redundancy.
Vetoes
The security team have noted the following problems in supporting the architecture:
- None
The Debian admin team have noted the following problems in supporting the architecture:
- None
The release team have noted the following problems in supporting the architecture:
- None