gentoo

Well… I’ve been quiet, but slowly, I’m preparing what will become a port of Gentoo/MIPS to the Lemote Yeeloong.

I have it booting off a USB HDD for now, sans X11, but I’m working on that.  The kernel at present needs some patches not yet present in the Linux/MIPS kernel tree.  To build a kernel, you also need GCC 4.4.0 (which supports -march=loongson2f) and binutils (2.19.51.0.2 or later) with this patch.  I’m looking into what is necessary in order to get these patches into our tree.  Patched ebuilds for both are in my overlay.

Once that is done… next attention will be to Mozilla Firefox 3.5 and Mozilla Thunderbird, both of which have been lagging on MIPS since I took my hiatus.  I’m still running to/from Laidley, but with the travel time… this would seem an excellent moment for package testing once I get Gentoo installed on this machine.

Here’s hoping I can return with some goodies for everyone shortly.

Hi All,

Well, I’ve just dusted off the second Lemote Fulong here, and I’m booting it up for another round of stagebuilds. (Yes… I haven’t gotten around to locating and implementing the auto stagebuild scripts that everyone else seems to be using.)

I’m also getting a newer piece of MIPS kit… a Lemote Yeeloong is currently sitting at Brisbane Airport in a box with my name on it… hopefully it’ll be in my hands by Wednesday evening. This will enable support of Gentoo/MIPS on this platform, and will also allow me to do some MIPS testing of packages while on my many hours of travelling between Brisbane and Laidley and hours spent at university. It’s based on the Loongson 2F CPU, which implements the MIPS64 ISA (the Loongson 2Es in the Fulongs implements MIPS3), and is little-endian.

Hopefully this will mean the bug count will start to decline once more for the MIPS team. 🙂

Hi all…

Well, after a long hiatus, I’m working on new stages for the Gentoo/MIPS port.  These new ones will be based on uClibc, and are a compliment to the existing glibc-based stages.  At the moment, the initial seed environment is still being cross-compiled from my i686 host, and for now I’m focussing on mipsel but will soon turn my attention to MIPS.

These stages initially will not operate with a page size of 16KB or more, so unfortunately aren’t much good for Lemote users (I’m working with the uClibc people on this) but Cobalt and SGI users will soon once again be able to use uClibc as their system libc.  The new stages will be based on uClibc 0.9.30… which is yet to be keyworded.

Hi all… figured I better update everyone on what’s happening on the MIPS front.

Kumba has been working on newer kernel ebuilds to support various platforms, specifically IP30, which has been troublesome of late. At present, the best kernel revision to use is still 2.6.23 on Cobalt, Loongson 2E and O2.

Another alternative, is to download your own kernels from the Linux/MIPS website (not kernel.org), and research the patches needed to get things running yourself… in fact… Lemote Loongson 2E, Cobalt Qube2 and SGI Indy/O2 users should find minimal to no patching is necessary as the vast majority of changes have already been accepted into the mainline kernel.

Stages… there have been no further stages built at the moment from the 2008.0 ones. Partly because some of us have been just too busy. I’ve started to make inroads into a uClibc-based set of stages however, having got a uClibc-0.9.30 toolchain built the other day targetted at mipsel-unknown-linux-uclibc. It is hoped a workable environment can be constructed in the coming months that may turn into a new set of stages available for this platform.

Desktop Applications… have been lagging quite a bit. I have some patches for Thunderbird 2.0 that gets things rolling again… and may just work for big-endian MIPS (which was broken at last check) but due to lack of time, I haven’t been able to investigate further. A similar set of patches got Firefox 3.0 partially working… more work needs to be done.

My own status… I’m not planning on leaving anytime soon… just been extremely busy. As it is now, I’m passed my 8:00PM bed time (need to be up at 4:00AM tomorrow, currently it is 8:35PM AEST), so I’ll leave it at that.

Hi All,

My P4 laptop died recently, which is a pain as I now have to look at replacing it in the near future… however, this has meant I now have 2GB of DDR400 SODIMMS that can be used in the Lemote systems.

There was a catch however.  The PROM had to be flashed on one of the units so it would initialise the RAM properly, otherwise the kernel would b0rk.  With this done, both units now recognise the 1GB sticks of RAM installed.

At present, both systems are available for developer use.

How to upgrade the PROM on the Fulong.

For the reference of others who may wish to perform this upgrade on their Lemote equipment.  This is the procedure.

1. Download pmon_v1.1.zip from this page and unpack it.
2. Copy the pmon.bin file located inside, to your /boot partition (or somewhere else accessible to the PROM)
3. Reboot, and hit ESC/DEL repeatedly to break into the PMON prompt.
4. Type set, and write down any critical settings such as al and karg
5. At the PMON prompt, enter the following command (adjust:path as appropriate)
   load -r -f bfc00000 /dev/fs/ext2@wd0/pmon.bin
6. Restore the settings you wrote down using set arg value.
7. Type reboot to reset the system.

If at step 5, the load fails, DO NOT REBOOT OR POWER OFF! Hit the up-arrow on your keyboard, double check the command, then press ENTER to execute it again.

I’d like to thank the members of the Lemote Forum community who provided the necessary infromation.

I’m pleased to annouce the final 2008.0 stages have been published.  I haven’t yet gotten around to giving them a run, I’ll set up a couple of chroots and do some test builds shortly, but in the meantime, I have put them up on my devspace for public review.

As previously announced, this release sees the addition of generic MIPS-1 stages for both big and little endian, as well as new stages for little-endian MIPS-3.  We still only support the hardware listed in the handbook however — the generic stages are provided merely as a convenience to those who may wish to experiment with other hardware, and know what they’re doing.

Approximately 1.2GB got uploaded over the 30 or so hours… this is apparent from my NTP server’s performance this weekend:

… Yeah… I think I’ll wait until I’m back at uni before I upload any more big files. 😉

Anyway… as I say, the new stages are up, and I’d be greatful if some brave users could take them for a spin and report back.  In the meantime, I’ve got some chroots to set up and testing to do.