Reviving Fedora MIPS

Mon Jun 1 20:39:32 UTC 2015

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/
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