Re: MIPS support

[Jack Hill <jackhill@jackhill.us>]

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On Wed, 6 May 2020, Vincent Legoll wrote:

> Hello,
>
>> In the intervening years, interest faded away as free software friendly
>> MIPS hardware became more rare.
>
> I grabbed a gnubee during the crowdfunding campaign, but the CPU
> is too low spec to do a lot of compilation on it.

I also have a gnubee, and would love to be able to put Guix on it. 
However, so far I haven't put much time into getting it working. It would 
certainly be more fun to work on it with others :)

My impression is that the the gnubee is a different class of MIPS than the 
current port. I think that the gnubee is a SoC that is is targeted at home 
routers and is 32-bit, while the current port is 64-bit and targeted at 
chips like the longsoon. Is that correct?

There seems to be a a fair amount of the router-class hardware available 
that works with Free Software, but not much, if any, of the latter, more 
powerful hardware. Unfortunately, I think having the more powerful 
hardware available would make it much easier to work on the port.

[…]

>> What do people think?
>
> I may not be able to put huge time in it so won't ask you to keep it
> just for me.
>
> I'll restart working / trying things in the foreign archs area after my
> list of pending things is drained a bit (guix-install.sh & tarball CI,
> native-inputs lint warning chasing) but that's only wishful thinking
> for now.

I feel similarly. It's always sad to see things go (I used to have a 
collection of SPARC hardware, but let it go when I moved a few years ago), 
but no need to keep it just for me.

Vincent, it sounds like there are at least two of us. Maybe we can work 
together.

Best,
Jack