[gentoo-dev] Monthly mips@ project status for April 2018

[Matt Turner <mattst88@gentoo.org>]

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I'd like to start giving ~monthly updates on the status of mips@ in
Gentoo.

Recently I received a Loongson 3A system (quad-core 1.35GHz, 16GB RAM,
AMD graphics) which is significantly faster and more stable than any
other mips system I have.

mips@ is currently assigned or cc'd on 29 bugs. This number is down from
probably >50 at the beginning of March.

My list of to-do items consists of:

== Switch to stable profiles ==
https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/pull/7672

While keeping mips unstable (KEYWORDS=~mips) I plan to switch the
profiles from exp to stable so that no new breakage is added.

To that end, I've been working to test and keyword packages until we can
flip the switch without adding any breakage ourselves. See the github
pull request for the current status. I'll periodically rebase the branch
as I add more keywords to the main tree.

My plan is to add stable 17.0 mips profiles when the keywording is
sorted out and kill two birds with one stone.

== Loongson 3A support ==

The Loongson 3A system I received requires a number of out of tree
patches to the kernel, gcc, binutils, and glibc. I've seen their
developers working to upstream kernel patches, but it's slow going and
there are a lot of them.

I haven't seen much work to upstream the other patches. I'm not sure how
to reasonably support hardware requiring so many out-of-tree patches.

== n64 (the ABI!) support ==
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=442548
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=513042

I want to support the tree main ABIs: Old 32 ("o32"), New 32 ("n32"),
and New 64 ("n64").

n32 is equivalent to amd64's x32 ABI: 64-bit ABI but with 32-bit
pointers. It's the default ABI we use for 64-bit MIPS.

I'd like to offer n64 support as well, but gcc is not quite ready. At
this point I have figured out the gcc build system enough to hack
something together that works. I just need to... upstream something I
guess?

== n64 toolchain in n32 system ==
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477956

n32 (and o32) only offer 31-bits of address space (2GB). That's not
sufficient to link large libraries like webkit-gtk. For n32 systems, I'd
like the toolchain binaries to be n64, to avoid these problems.

That's going to be some amount of work on top of regular n64 support,
but hopefully not too much. multilib/ABI_MIPS support already exists and
works.

== stages and installation media ==
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=150402
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=348647

With so many subarchitectures, ABIs, and two byte orderings providing
stages and installation media has been a pain point.

I'd like to automate as much of this as possible. I really need Kumba to
build a new SGI CD, but well, that bug's been open since 2006.

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