Reviving Fedora MIPS
Greetings everyone,
you might know me from my former work on ABRT, or later Power and s390.
For the last few months however, I have been collaborating with
Imagination Technologies to bring back Fedora for MIPS.
A brief history - some effort to bootstrap Fedora for MIPS has been done
around Fedora 11/12/13, but died afterwards because of lack of interest.
Even though the RPMs were labelled with mips64el architecture, they were
using the hybrid n32 ABI with 32-bit pointers and 64-bit data, rather
than the full 64-bit n64 ABI.
Since we decided to go with n64 rather than n32, we have tried to
bootstrap the distribution from scratch (well, almost) to see how much
problems we will run into. I need to say that I was very surprised that
a majority of packages build fine with no or just minor tweaks to
specfiles and very few packages do require actual code patching.
Anyway, we have now arrived into a state where Fedora mips64el userspace
can be booted and played with. I have created a QEMU image [1] and all
the packages and repositories are available from mipsfedora.imgtec.com
[2]. I have also created some wiki pages [3] briefly describing what we
are doing and will continue to expand them in the following days to be
more detailed.
Apart from mips64el, we have lately started working on 32-bit mipsel, to
be ran on the Creator CI20 Borad [4]. This is basically 3 months behind
mips64el so there are no significant results yet, but hopefully will be
soon.
Future plans are, naturally, to turn MIPS into a fully-fledged secondary
architecture, deploy koji-shadow, compose releases and do everything
other secondary archs do. Build hardware is likely to be donated by
Imagination Technologies.
Any help would be appreciated, especially in the area of kernel, u-boot
and some specific languages - haskell, erlang, ocaml etc. I have already
been playing with some of those and there is a list of issues on the wiki.
Hopefully you will like Fedora MIPS back
Regards,
Michal
[1] http://mipsfedora.imgtec.com/development/22/mips64el/images/20150601/
[2] http://mipsfedora.imgtec.com/development/22/mips64el/
[3] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/MIPS/2015Bootstrap
[4] http://community.imgtec.com/platforms/creator-ci20/