ubuntu-mips team mailing list archive

[Bernd Siggy Brentrup <bsb@xxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Sep 07, 2009 at 09:33 +0100, Peter Kay - Syllopsium wrote:
>> From: "Siggy Brentrup" <bsb@xxxxxxxx>

[snip]

>> Given this is for MIPS64, which ABI does it implement (o32, n32 or
>> n64)?
> It doesn't. OpenBSD does not support IP22. It only supports IP32 (O2) 
> with a reasonable degree of success (kernel, userland, X) and 
> IP27/IP30/IP35 rather experimentally (kernel, userland. no framebuffer.). 
> AFAIAA OpenBSD sgimips is entirely 64 bit, and remains the only OS for 
> the O2 that is (even Irix is 32 bit on the O2; the limit of 1GB 
> addressable memory makes 64 bit a little less useful).

see below on usefulness.

> NetBSD supports IP22 as well as IP6, IP10, IP12, IP20 and IP24. All of 
> this is 32 bit.
>
> However, personally I'd recommend not using *BSD at all. Given that 
> you're intending to port a Linux distribution - namely Ubuntu, why aren't 
> you using either Gentoo or Debian (preferable, less setup time) as a base 
> - both of which have a functional and mostly fully featured port (apart 
> from the fact that many configure scripts recoil in horror from a 
> completely unrecognised architecture).

Obviously you didn't follow the member links of ~ubuntu-mips to find
https://launchpad.net/~bsb, there I mention I have been a DD from 1995
thru 2004.  When reentering the OSS world recently I agreed with
Martin from Debian's mips group to work on that port - but I insisted
in having a vote in Debian's affairs before contributing
substantially.  Debian's current powers wanted it the other way round
and now Debian and me are divorced like Deb is from Ian IRL :) 

As far as Debian is concerned I'm now a mere user who will report bugs
if inclined to and possibly contribute as upstream.  I know Debian's
mips port is desperately looking for manpower.

> If it's simply a matter of getting a 32 bit OS up and running as soon as  
> possible, then the clear choice is NetBSD. According to its ports page,  
> there are eight different ports to little endian MIPS. If 'the chinese' 
> are sniffy about not having a 32 bit OS, I can't see them being happy 
> about porting a completely different OS in 32 bit to 64 bit, though.

I guess we have some confusion in terminology here, the n32 ABI is a
64 bit one but with userland addresses limited to 32 bits.  The vast
majority of applications will never come near the 4GiB barrier hence
using 64bit virtual addresses is a waste in valuable cache and program
space. Data are 64bit though.

Thanks for the NetBSD tip, I'll look after it.
  Siggy

btw: The sgi@o.o list seems to break utf-8, my previous post contained
     chinese characters in its .signature.
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