Redhatter (VK4MSL)

Hi,

As promised, some stages compiled for MIPS-I have been released.  These stages should be appropriate for almost all little-endian MIPS hardware equipped with a decent amount of memory (128MB or more).  This should make things a little easier for those wishing to install Gentoo on MIPS32 hardware such as AMD Alchemy development boards.

Note, anything kernel or bootloader related, we can’t help with.  It’s assumed you know what you’re doing as far as actually preparing a bootable kernel and configuring your firmware to boot Gentoo.

Next on the list, is to look into µClibc stages for Cobalt — which will hopefully be used to produce updated netboot images for Cobalt.  So yeah, I’ve been absent for the last week or so, de-stressing and getting uni sorted out.  In short, it’s all system’s go now.

Hi All,

I’ve just uploaded the stage 3 tarball for Cobalt users. This build is compiled for MIPS4… hopefully in a few days ~ a week, a MIPS1 build will join it. I’d greatly appreciate it if users could test these builds out and report back any findings.

Also, in case you missed… there’s a new CoLo release. I’ve tested it both booting from disk, as well as netbooting, and so far, everything seems to work as it should… but I’d again appreciate feedback before I bump it to stable. I aim to do this very soon, as the presently stable version does not compile under gcc-4.1.

Hopefully, I should have all this on mirrors by the end of the month once testing has been completed.

Hi All…

Well, my stagebuilds are in full swing… at this rate, I hope to have stage1 up in a day or two, and I’ll be starting on stage2, etc very soon.
New Profiles:

The structure is much the same as the 2006.1 release, just replace “2006.1” with “2007.0” in your profile path. Portage will tell you what to do when we officially mark the profiles deprecated.  Or, you can switch ahead of time… e.g. on Cobalt:

# rm /etc/make.profile
# ln -sv /usr/portage/profiles/default-linux/mips/2007.0/cobalt/o32 /etc/make.profile

This will set your machine up with the new profile (using LinuxThreads… see below for NPTL).

MIPS1 Stages for Cobalt:

There has been some demand for such stage files for some time now, mainly for enthusiasts that wish to run Gentoo on mipsel machines that don’t implement the full MIPS4 ISA. In this release (after I get the MIPS4 stuff pushed out safely), I’ll build MIPS1 stages for those who wish to experiment. Please Note: We can’t help you with queries involving unsupported systems. For some userland-related issues, we may be able to provide some assistance, but anything involving hardware or kernel, you’re on your own.

The MIPS1 stages are primarily being used in a few unofficial ports of Gentoo to various architectures. I won’t say much more than that, as there are some legal issues which need to be addressed first… however, it is hoped these ports can go ahead. Naturally, I’ll let you know when this happens.

Heads Up – 2007.1 release:

In 2007.1, we plan to switch over to running NPTL across all MIPS platforms. At present, I’m doing some testing on mipsel using NPTL to confirm stability. Other MIPS developers have been running NPTL on SGI boxes for some months now with great success, so the code is considered reasonably stable now, even though it’s not keyworded as such. To use NPTL, switch to the nptl/ profile for your system, unmask glibc-2.4-r4, then upgrade glibc:

e.g. on Cobalt:

# rm /etc/make.profile
# ln -sv /usr/portage/profiles/default-linux/mips/2007.0/cobalt/o32/nptl /etc/make.profile
# echo '=sys-libs/glibc-2.4-r4 ~mips' >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
# emerge -a glibc

It would be greatly appreciated, if a few brave users could give this a try, and report back their findings.

Hi All…

Well, it’s that time of the year again… the lead up to release time for 2007.0. The official snapshot date is apparently next week sometime, which means I need to produce some pre-2007.0 stages in preparation.

Recently, I started the beginnings of an n32 port to Cobalt, with these stages being available from my devspace (contact me and I’ll provide the URL). In this release, I hope to provide stage1/2 tarballs (perhaps stage3 too) compiled for MIPS1, potentially allowing all standard (note; the PS2 and PSP are not standard) LE MIPS systems to run Gentoo. Users porting Gentoo to new platforms will still be largely on their own as far as support goes… but at least they’ll have a reasonable base system to work from.

Also on my TODO list, is to update the docs. Things aren’t too shabby, however there are some bootloader-related updates, now that arcboot has been punted from the tree, and arcload 0.5 is stable. CoLo will eventually need to be updated too… I’ve held off doing this, since I use my Qube2 as a file server, and thus value its availability. Also, since my PDA has decided to go on the blink, I’ve been without a convenient VT100 terminal to plug in… thus I’ll need to build a new null-modem cable to hook my laptop up.

Hopefully by next week, I’ll have some prerelease stages for 2007.0 (32-bit only for now)… and can start building the official stages once the snapshots are released by the Release Engineering team.