[gentoo-mips] Status of Gentoo/MIPS developers

[gentoo-mips] Status of Gentoo/MIPS developers

[Matt Turner]

What are all the developers up to? CIA.vc has some interesting stats,
mainly that everyone is totally inactive.

Developer - Last Portage Commit Date
kumba - Apr 17, 2009
iluxa - Dec 13, 2009 (don't see any MIPS related commits?)
peitolm - Dec 07, 2008 (don't see any MIPS commits?) (marked in
devaway as coming back from vacation on 22nd April 2009...)
redhatter - Oct 26, 2009
ricmm - Mar 24, 2009 (marked in devaway as coming back within a month
on 2009/08/17)

I've seen kumba and redhatter on IRC, so I know they're around,
somewhat. But where is everyone else?

I'd really like to put Gentoo on my O2s, and can help out myself, but
a couple active developers would be nice.

Matt

Re: [gentoo-mips] Status of Gentoo/MIPS developers

[Jerry Jackson]

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I'm not one of the devs, but I've been through the install on an O2 quite a
few times... love that little machine... If you run into any problems, feel
free to ask and I'll try to help you find the best way to work through them.

schade

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Re: [gentoo-mips] Status of Gentoo/MIPS developers

[Alexander Færøy]

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On Wed, Jan 06, 2010 at 08:40:53PM -0500, Matt Turner wrote:
> I'd really like to put Gentoo on my O2s, and can help out myself, but
> a couple active developers would be nice.

I'd personally just try to install Gentoo on my O2 and see if something
breaks. Usually these machines are fairly well-supported upstream-wise,
so hopefully you wont see much breakage.

Gentoo/MIPS has been pretty much inactive for the past years, mainly due
to lack of time amongst the development team, but also because it's
difficult to find powerful enough hardware that allows you to get your
job done tonight and not in fourteen days.

Of course you could just start buggering them on IRC or on this
mailing-list with various patches and such :)

-- 
Alexander Færøy

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Re: [gentoo-mips] Status of Gentoo/MIPS developers

[Christopher G. Stach II]

----- "Alexander Færøy" <ahf@0x90.dk> wrote:

> Gentoo/MIPS has been pretty much inactive for the past years, mainly
> due
> to lack of time amongst the development team, but also because it's
> difficult to find powerful enough hardware that allows you to get
> your
> job done tonight and not in fourteen days.

I have an Origin 2000 sitting next to me doing nothing, so if someone wants to develop on it they can. The only catch is that they have to pay the power bill. :)

-- 
Christopher G. Stach II
http://ldsys.net/~cgs/

Re: [gentoo-mips] Status of Gentoo/MIPS developers

[Kumba]

Christopher G. Stach II wrote:
> 
> I have an Origin 2000 sitting next to me doing nothing, so if someone wants to develop on it they can. The only catch is that they have to pay the power bill. :)
> 

Hah!  We thought you vanished.

-- 
Joshua Kinard
Gentoo/MIPS
kumba@gentoo.org

"The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us.  And our 
lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between."

--Emperor Turhan, Centauri Republic

Re: [gentoo-mips] Status of Gentoo/MIPS developers

[Christopher G. Stach II]

----- "Kumba" <kumba@gentoo.org> wrote:

> Christopher G. Stach II wrote:
> > 
> > I have an Origin 2000 sitting next to me doing nothing, so if
> someone wants to develop on it they can. The only catch is that they
> have to pay the power bill. :)
> > 
> 
> Hah!  We thought you vanished.
> 

I did. ;)

-- 
Christopher G. Stach II
http://ldsys.net/~cgs/

Re: [gentoo-mips] Status of Gentoo/MIPS developers

[Matt Turner]

2010/1/8 Alexander Færøy <ahf@0x90.dk>:
> On Wed, Jan 06, 2010 at 08:40:53PM -0500, Matt Turner wrote:
>> I'd really like to put Gentoo on my O2s, and can help out myself, but
>> a couple active developers would be nice.
>
> I'd personally just try to install Gentoo on my O2 and see if something
> breaks. Usually these machines are fairly well-supported upstream-wise,
> so hopefully you wont see much breakage.

I don't see any point in using the o32 ABI, so I tried the 2006.1 n32
stage (the _latest_ is 2006.1...) and after a couple failed attempts,
I've decided it's too far gone to be of any use.

> Gentoo/MIPS has been pretty much inactive for the past years, mainly due
> to lack of time amongst the development team, but also because it's
> difficult to find powerful enough hardware that allows you to get your
> job done tonight and not in fourteen days.

Yes, compiling stuff like glibc is quite time consuming on an O2.

To me, the problem seems to actually be a collection of problems.
First, there is as you said a lack of usably fast MIPS hardware.
Octeon stuff is unobtainable, as is most new MIPS hardware. And the
later generation SGI systems are entirely unsupported in Linux.
(OpenBSD for a comparison seems to have increasingly good support of
IP35+). It looks to me that current mips kernel development is limited
to high-end, unobtainable mips systems, and Lemote. That is to say, no
SGI development. Quad 600 MHz Origin 300s with 4GB RAM are _cheap_.
That'd be the ticket to affordable and fast mips systems if the kernel
support was there.

On top if that, the Gentoo devmanual states [0] that in order to mark
a package as ~mips, "[t]he package should work on both big and little
endian systems, on both pure 32 bit and pure 64 bit systems and on
systems with differing kernel and userland ABIs." That means testing
on (big endian/little endian) x (32bit/64bit/mixed kernel/user) x
(o32/n32/n64) == 18 potential combinations. (I guess actually less.
I'm not sure how you could have an o32-pure-64-bit system for
instance).

God. Let's dump o32 already. That cuts the number to 12. At this
point, it's still ridiculous to ask a single developer to test this
many configurations. Split ~mips into ~mips-be and ~mips-le or
something. This would certainly make it more manageable. Whatever the
case, we've got to limit the range of possible configurations.

> Of course you could just start buggering them on IRC or on this
> mailing-list with various patches and such :)

Well. There are two developers on IRC. I talk to them occasionally,
but I don't think constant prodding is the way to productivity.

Matt

[0] http://devmanual.gentoo.org/archs/mips/index.html

Re: [gentoo-mips] Status of Gentoo/MIPS developers

[Alexander Færøy]

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On Fri, Jan 08, 2010 at 11:32:24PM -0500, Matt Turner wrote:
> I don't see any point in using the o32 ABI, so I tried the 2006.1 n32
> stage (the _latest_ is 2006.1...) and after a couple failed attempts,
> I've decided it's too far gone to be of any use.

An attempt to install an almost four year old stage is doomed to fail.
Gentoo has got new EAPI's and such, and the version of Portage shipped
in those stages is probably going to explode immediately after the
initial sync.

o32 has always been the most well-supported MIPS ABI for Gentoo/MIPS
installations. I didn't even do an n32 or n64 stage for the 2007.0
release mainly due to lack of time and such. Consider o32 to be the most
stable ABI for your Gentoo setup as it is today. You could, of course,
easily start experimenting with it as well.

> On top if that, the Gentoo devmanual states [0] that in order to mark
> a package as ~mips, "[t]he package should work on both big and little
> endian systems, on both pure 32 bit and pure 64 bit systems and on
> systems with differing kernel and userland ABIs." That means testing
> on (big endian/little endian) x (32bit/64bit/mixed kernel/user) x
> (o32/n32/n64) == 18 potential combinations. (I guess actually less.
> I'm not sure how you could have an o32-pure-64-bit system for
> instance).

I personally never really cared about little-endian systems and I'd
guess that most of Gentoo/MIPS development team doesn't care either.
It's very difficult to get non-router-sized little-endian MIPS-based
machines, so it is almost impossible to do something even remotely
useful with Gentoo on those machines. Little-endian MIPS porting has
always been done by those who had access to the hardware (for example:
Cobalt machines) and has been silently ignored by everyone else.

Usually you can just stick to testing packages on whatever you are
running, but for most critical system packages, it is really a good idea
to test it on non-o32 ABI's as well.

> God. Let's dump o32 already. That cuts the number to 12. At this
> point, it's still ridiculous to ask a single developer to test this
> many configurations. Split ~mips into ~mips-be and ~mips-le or
> something. This would certainly make it more manageable. Whatever the
> case, we've got to limit the range of possible configurations.

That would require a much more active MIPS team. It may sound silly that
getting rid of an ABI takes time, but getting rid of the "main" ABI is
not a very easy task.

> Well. There are two developers on IRC. I talk to them occasionally,
> but I don't think constant prodding is the way to productivity.

How so? That's how I ended up joining Gentoo/MIPS some years ago.

-- 
Alexander Færøy

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Re: [gentoo-mips] Status of Gentoo/MIPS developers

[Dirk Tilger]

On Sat, Jan 09, 2010 at 01:55:20AM +0100, Alexander Fry wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 06, 2010 at 08:40:53PM -0500, Matt Turner wrote:
> > I'd really like to put Gentoo on my O2s, and can help out myself, but
> > a couple active developers would be nice.

If it's about using Gentoo on your O2, you could look for any Linux
distribution to give you a solid ground and then use gentoo-prefix in
your daily activities. That would even work if you had IRIX on the box,
but is most likely equally experimental as having Gentoo on it.

> Gentoo/MIPS has been pretty much inactive for the past years, mainly due
> to lack of time amongst the development team, but also because it's
> difficult to find powerful enough hardware that allows you to get your
> job done tonight and not in fourteen days.

What might help: Using gentoo-embedded one could emerge a cross
compilation toolchain on a decent compilation machine of any
architecture (sys-devel/crossdev). Then you export that compiler using
sys-devel/distcc and make it available on your slow Gentoo/MIPS box.

Dirk.

Re: [gentoo-mips] Status of Gentoo/MIPS developers

[Alexander Færøy]

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On Sat, Jan 09, 2010 at 08:10:58PM +0400, Dirk Tilger wrote:
> If it's about using Gentoo on your O2, you could look for any Linux
> distribution to give you a solid ground and then use gentoo-prefix in
> your daily activities. That would even work if you had IRIX on the box,
> but is most likely equally experimental as having Gentoo on it.

Why on earth would anyone want to do that? That is perhaps the most
silly solution to an issue that has ever been suggested on this list.

> What might help: Using gentoo-embedded one could emerge a cross
> compilation toolchain on a decent compilation machine of any
> architecture (sys-devel/crossdev). Then you export that compiler using
> sys-devel/distcc and make it available on your slow Gentoo/MIPS box.

Except that some important packages are a pain in the arse to
cross-compile.

-- 
Alexander Færøy

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Re: [gentoo-mips] Status of Gentoo/MIPS developers

[Kumba]

Matt Turner wrote:
> What are all the developers up to? CIA.vc has some interesting stats,
> mainly that everyone is totally inactive.
> 
> Developer - Last Portage Commit Date
> kumba - Apr 17, 2009
> iluxa - Dec 13, 2009 (don't see any MIPS related commits?)
> peitolm - Dec 07, 2008 (don't see any MIPS commits?) (marked in
> devaway as coming back from vacation on 22nd April 2009...)
> redhatter - Oct 26, 2009
> ricmm - Mar 24, 2009 (marked in devaway as coming back within a month
> on 2009/08/17)
> 
> I've seen kumba and redhatter on IRC, so I know they're around,
> somewhat. But where is everyone else?
> 
> I'd really like to put Gentoo on my O2s, and can help out myself, but
> a couple active developers would be nice.
> 
> Matt

I've just been tied up in job changes and buying a house and all the fun little 
bits associated with that mess.  I actually have my O2 somewhat updated, just 
haven't looked at newer kernels yet.

Octane is dead right now.  The bitrot finally consumed it, and while I got the 
base code somewhat booting with clocksource and other bits, the death by INIT 
hang stopped all development, since that kind of a bug is downright impossible 
to debug on those systems.

I have an Origin 300 I'd like to eventually get Linux running on, but so few 
people have access to those systems that the current code (2.6.29) can't 
properly yank the MAC address out of the EEPROM on the things.  It might be able 
to boot to a ramdisk, but I never tried that far.  I do have all the gear 
necessary to make it available to anyone who wants a shot (serial switch w/ SSH 
access, etc), just haven't finished plugging all the bits in just yet. 
Efficiency wise, it'd destroy an Octane, which mine used to be a 550MHz R14000 
that drew ~303W.  The O300 pulls like, ~200W and has 4x 500MHz R14000 procs in it.

Indy, Indigo2, Unsure.  Should still boot.  R10000 I2 is probably still bootable 
too.

Still o32 on the userland.  n32 is probably gambler's luck at this point.

Hope that gives you some idea of the status on things.  MIPS is moving more 
towards embedded stuff, leaving the only "workstation" gear to be the old SGI 
systems and for those lucky enough, Longsoon development hardware.

Cheers!,

-- 
Joshua Kinard
Gentoo/MIPS
kumba@gentoo.org

"The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us.  And our 
lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between."

--Emperor Turhan, Centauri Republic