[gentoo-dev-announce] New mips team initiative: desktop support for the lemote yeeloong netbook

[gentoo-dev-announce] New mips team initiative: desktop support for the lemote yeeloong netbook

[Anthony G. Basile]

Hi everyone,

I'd like to announce a new initiative within the mips arch team.  We are 
now supporting an xfce4-based desktop system for the lemote yeeloong 
netbook [1].  The images can be found on the gentoo mirrors, under  
gentoo/experimental/mips/desktop-loongson2f.  The installation 
instructions can be found at ref [2].  The yeeloong netbook is 
particularly interesting because it only uses "free" hardware, ie. 
hardware which doesn't require any proprietary code.  It is manufactured 
by Lemote in China [3], and distributed and promoted in the US by 
"Freedom Included" [4].  It is how Richard Stallman does his computing [5].

While I'm not sure this is worthy of "subproject" status, it is 
important for the gentoo community to know that mips devices are 
currently being manufactured and used in netbooks as well as embedded 
systems.  The gentoo mips team has risen to the challenge of targetting 
these systems and maintaining natively compiled stage4's for them.  Why 
stage4's?  And why a full desktop for the yeeloong?  These processors 
are slow, so the time from a stage3 to a desktop is about three days for 
the yeeloong.  Also, the yeeloong sports a little endian mips64 
processor, the loongson2f, and we support three ABIs: o32, n32 and n64, 
with n32 being the preferred.  This significantly increases the time to 
build glibc and some other core packages.  I provide two images, a 
vanilla and a hardened image.  The latter adds full hardening (pie, ssp, 
_FORTIFY_SOURCES=2, bind now, relro) to the toolchain and userland 
binaries as we do for amd64 and i686 in hardened gentoo.  I have not 
ported over the hardened kernel, however.

I allude above to "other" targetted devices.  I am also maintaining some 
mips uclibc systems (both hardened and vanilla) which are on the gentoo 
mirrors under experimental/mips/uclibc.  But I will speak more of these 
later as part of an initiative to maintain hardened uclibc systems on 
"alternative" architectures such as arm, mips, ppc as well as amd64 and 
i686.


Ref.

[1] http://www.lemote.com/en/products/Notebook/2010/0310/112.html
[2] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/mips/yeeloong.xml
[3] http://lemote.com/en/
[4] http://freedomincluded.com
[5] http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

-- 
Anthony G. Basile, Ph.D.
Gentoo Linux Developer [Hardened]
E-Mail    : blueness@gentoo.org
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GnuPG ID  : D0455535