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:

  1. Broadcom (low and high-end CPUs)

  2. Linksys (Range of APs and networked servers)

  3. SGI (High end servers and workstations)

  4. 4G Systems (Small routers)

  5. RouterBoard

  6. Mycable XSS1500

... and so on. MIPS Inc. maintains a list of MIPS Licensees

Developer machines

The following machines are available to developers:

  1. casals.debian.org (mipsel) - maintained by Noah L. Meyerhans, connectivity via MIT.

  2. 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

  1. Thiemo Seufer (ths) - d-i, toolchain, kernel, upstream, user support... [mips/mipsel]
  2. Guido Guenther (agx) - misc [mostly mips]
  3. Florian Lohoff (flo) - misc [mostly mips]
  4. Karsten Merker (merker) - DECstation support [mostly mipsel, also mips]
  5. Peter de Schrijver (p2) - d-i, sibyl (boot loader), kernel [mips/mipsel]
  6. Martin Michlmayr (tbm) - d-i, coLo (boot loader), documentation [mips/mipsel]
  7. Ryan Murray (rmurray) - buildd admin [mips/mipsel]

Users

The port is being actively used at the following sites:

  1. RouterBoard sells MIPS boards and includes Debian as its OS [mipsel]

  2. Broadcom uses Debian internally on MIPS and they have donated several machines to Debian to support the port [mips]
  3. MIPS Technologies tests GCC/MIPS using Debian (see debian-mips list)

  4. Front Street Networks sells old Cobalt machines with Debian pre-installed [mipsel]

  5. Debian is popular on old SGI machines (in particular Indy) [mips]
  6. 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]

  7. PRISMIQ sells a MediaPlayer Set-Top Box, running a customized version of Debian GNU/Linux. [mipsel]

Future use:

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:

We intend to support all of these sub-architectures for etch, plus some more, including:

Upstream support

Upstream support is provided by:

Archive coverage and Autobuilder support

Archive cleanliness

The port builds from unmodified Debian source.

Autobuilders

The following machines run buildds for the port:

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:

Vetoes

The security team have noted the following problems in supporting the architecture:

The Debian admin team have noted the following problems in supporting the architecture:

The release team have noted the following problems in supporting the architecture:


CategoryEtchReleaseRecertification