It has been a long time between drinks for Gentoo/MIPS… but at last, I’ve managed to get something rolling, and hopefully I should have some stages out by the end of the year.
What took me so long? A number of packages didn’t want to compile… particularly python-2.6 and gcc-4.4. The former exhibited various compiler errors… I think I’ve got that sussed now. The latter would compile xgcc, then that binary would promptly die with an Internal Compiler Error.
I couldn’t resolve the latter due to not having anything other than MIPS hardware at home for development. So when I managed to cobble together a Duron 900MHz, I was able to use that to cross-compile a minimal environment with a C-only gcc (it wouldn’t build without USE=nocxx) and supply a version of Python from my Yeeloong.
I now have the Qube2 busy running the bootstrap script, it has self-compiled its own python-2.6 now and is working through the other base-system packages. I found the Lemote boxes seemed to exhibit an odd lock-up at specific points of the build, but the Qube2 just keeps plodding along. Ahh well, they do say “slow and steady wins the race”.
Speaking of slow and steady, the Duron 900MHz decided to keel over this morning… so I’m not sure if I’ll be able to put together a similar environment to bootstrap the big-endian port, but we’ll see. There’s money in the budget for a new 6-core AMD Phenom II system in the near future though, so by the time I get Gentoo/MIPS little-endian up and running, I should have new hardware to tackle the big-endian port with.
On other news… it seems the next Linux.conf.au is going to be here in Brisbane… shock horror I might be able to attend this one. 😉
Stuart
Hello once again. Sad to hear your Duron kicked the bucket.
I have a HP SBS server collecting dust, you are welcome to have
I wouldn’t mind going to Linux conf au, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to make it. Just depends on where I am working…
Sorry to ask you, but could you give a try building an llvm and see how it fares? If it dies horribly then before gcc-4.6 we should mention the issue to the gcc people since their gearing towards C++ may spoil your work in the short/medium time…
Strange, I didn’t see any error compiling python-2.6 and gcc-4.4. Anymore details? I’d like to try to reproduce them.
Have you or r0bertz pushed out anything to the stages that includes eselect by default? I ask because MIPS is the only arch that still has instructions for choosing profiles with ln -s, rather than using the standard ‘eselect profile’ command.
If the MIPS media included eselect (I know Portage depends on it, but it needs to be in the stages too), then that would help me close http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=234310, and make great progress toward finally getting the MIPS more standardized with the other handbooks. I’d be able to clean out a lot of special crufty old text that’s only in the MIPS HB.
Lemme know what’s up. Thanks!