Reviving Fedora MIPS

[Michal Toman]

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/

[Vicente Olivert Riera]

Good job Michal! Looking forward to try the QEMU image image when I find 
a bit of time.

Best regards,
--
vincent

On 01/06/15 22:10, Michal Toman wrote:
>  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/
>  _______________________________________________
>  mips mailing list
>  mips(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/mips
>

[Zamir Sun]

Thanks Michal.

Some of us in China are also thinking about make MIPS back to life. As
you've done this, we will join you in the effort.

Zamir

2015-06-02 4:10 GMT+08:00 Michal Toman <michal.toman(a)gmail.com&gt;:

>  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/
>  _______________________________________________
>  mips mailing list
>  mips(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/mips
>

[Christopher Meng]

On Tue, Jun 2, 2015 at 4:10 AM, Michal Toman <michal.toman(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
[cut]

I'm willing to see MIPS coming back to Fedora supported arch.

However I failed to apply for a GSoC project of fixing Fedora packages
on MIPS under Fedora Project this year, so I'm not sure if core
developers will show any interests on it.


Yours sincerely,
Christopher Meng

http://awk.io

[Michele Baldessari]

Hi Michal,

On Mon, Jun 01, 2015 at 10:10:17PM +0200, Michal Toman wrote:
>  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. 
I had started to work on this as well, so I am interested. Let us
know if you have anything usable around this. I'll be happy to chime in

cheers,
Michele
-- 
Michele Baldessari            <michele(a)acksyn.org&gt;
C2A5 9DA3 9961 4FFB E01B  D0BC DDD4 DCCB 7515 5C6D

[Michal Toman]

Thanks everybody for your interest. I am going to prepare some work plan
and hopefully we will find a suitable task for everyone. I will come
back to you likely next week.

Regards,
Michal

[Anibal Monsalve Salazar]

On Mon, 2015-06-01 22:39:32 +0200, Vicente Olivert Riera wrote:
>  Good job Michal! Looking forward to try the QEMU image image when I
>  find a bit of time. 
Michele Baldessari has a blog [1] about how he uses Michal's QEMU image.

[1] http://acksyn.org/blog/2015/06/01/running-fedora-mips/