Fedora 23 for MIPS

[Michal Toman]

Greetings everyone,

two months late, we have reached a state where Fedora 23 for MIPS works
reasonably well. Images have been built for QEMU (both mipsel [1] and
mips64el [2]) and the CI20 board (mipsel [3]). The bootstrap process is
still in stage4, we are waiting for koji hardware. Please note this is
not a full Fedora, approximately 15% of the packages are still missing.


A brief changelog over Fedora 22
================================

* QEMU now uses a Fedora-like kernel (bootable RPMs are built but
packaging and configs still need some work). Bits of CI20 kernel patches
were upstreamed but not enough to make the board run Fedora. The CI20
images therefore use the 3.18 kernel shipped with Debian image.

* initial-setup works now, it should come up when you boot any of the
images for the first time.

* XFCE and LXDE are built and work on the CI20.

* Wi-Fi and bluetooth firmware RPMs for the CI20 are available [4]. The
GPU driver, on the other hand, is still unavailable, the CI20 needs to
use fbdev.


Biggest issues at this moment
=============================

* -fpie (and therefore hardening) does not work on mipsel without an
explicit -mshared or -fPIC, it enables optimizations that do not work.
* Java (zero) builds on mipsel but dies on illegal instruction when
starting the VM. It seems to work better with the newer kernel in QEMU.
* eclipse needs bootstrap
* ada needs bootstrap
* atlas fails to detect mipsel and uses x86 assembly
* Firefox and Thunderbird do build on mipsel but crash on startup

Full list can be found on the wiki [5] [6].


Give it a try, any feedback is welcome.

Michal

[1] http://mipsfedora.imgtec.com/development/23/mipsel/images/qemu/
[2] http://mipsfedora.imgtec.com/development/23/mips64el/images/qemu/
[3] http://mipsfedora.imgtec.com/development/23/mipsel/images/ci20/
[4] http://mipsfedora.imgtec.com/development/23/mipsel/ci20/
[5]
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/MIPS/2015Bootstrap/mipsel/is...
[6]
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/MIPS/2015Bootstrap/mips64el/...