It would be a shame if packagers abandoned MIPS for lack of hardware
for debugging ... Does anyone know if replacement/repair of mahler is
on anyones to do list?
Agreed. I have not used QEMU for MIPS emulation, but I have used GXEmul for that extensively and found it to be quite solid. I ran sims for days on end doing "native" builds of PKGSRC for NetBSD mipsel targets. The only problem that I ever ran into is that some older GNU configure scripts test RISC alignment by purposefully generating access violations. There seems to be a bug in GXEmul where that would hang the sim completely. Therefore I had to work around the old configure scripts.
It would be nice if Cavium or one of the Chinese manufacturers like Lemote would donate some Octeon, Yeelong, Longsoon or what ever based equipment. That would get us up on some modern equipment with a longer lifespan, not to mention that those newer CPUs are quite zippy.
As those companies depend on a Linux based SDK to sell chips, I would think we all have a common interest here.
Regards,
-S-