Purpose

The purpose of this page is to demonstrate that mips and mipsel meet the architecture recertification criteria for lenny.

If some of these requirements are irrelevant or implausible for the port, please add a waiver request indicating why and how this isn't a problem for the arch in bold.

Availability

The architecture is publicly available without NDAs via:

  1. Fulong made by Lemote Technology

  2. Broadcom BCM91480 made by Broadcom

  3. RouterBoard

  4. Cavium Octeon

There are hundreds of different system types who were available in the past or are still build. See: linux-mips.org System List

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.

Both mips and mipsel could be emulated using QEMU. Installation instructions. Ready to use images

Port maintainers

The Debian port is maintained by the following developers, who actively work on architecture specific issues:

  1. Martin Michlmayr (tbm)
  2. Thiemo Seufer (ths) - d-i, toolchain, kernel, upstream, user support... [mips/mipsel]
  3. Aurelien Jarno (aurel32) - glibc, embedded devices
  4. Ryan Murray (rmurray) - buildd admin [mips/mipsel]
  5. ...

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. eppesuigoccas.homedns.org: 1 SGI O2 machine, 12 users, firewall+proxy+imaps+smtp+web server
  5. 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]

Popcon indicates 26 (mips) and 67 (mipsel) users of the architecture as at 2007/10/28 but these figures are certainly not representative.

Installer

The installer is being maintained by Martin Michlmayr, Thiemo Seufer, Joeyh Hess and it's currently working effectively. It supports the following subarchitectures:

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 for oldstable, stable, testing and unstable:

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.

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

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


CategoryLennyReleaseRecertification CategoryLennyReleaseRecertification