MIPS Port

Overview
Current Status
General Information about
Available Hardware for Debian Developers
Credits
Contact information
Links
Dedication

Overview

The MIPS port is actually two ports, debian-mips and debian-mipsel. They differ in the endianness of the binaries. MIPS CPUs are able to run at both endiannesses, but since that's normally not changeable in software, we need to have both architectures. SGI machines run in big-endian mode (debian-mips) while the Cobalt Qube/RaQ run in little-endian mode (debian-mipsel). Some boards, such as Broadcom's BCM91250A evaluation board (aka SWARM) can run in both modes, selectable by a switch on the board.

Current Status

Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.7 supports the following machines:

SGI Indy with R4x00 and R5000 CPUs, and Indigo2 with R4400 CPU (IP22).
SGI O2 with R5000, R5200 and RM7000 CPU (IP32).
Broadcom BCM91250A (SWARM) evaluation board (big and little-endian).
Cobalt RaQ, Qube2 and RaQ2.
MIPS Malta boards (big and little-endian, 32 and 64-bit).
Loongson 2e and 2f machines, including the Yeelong laptop (little-endian).
Cavium Octeon (big-endian).

General Information about

Please see the release notes and installation manual for more information.

Available Hardware for Debian Developers

gabrielli.debian.org (mips) is available to Debian developers for porting work. Please see the machine database for more information about this machine. In general, you will be able to use the three chroot environments: stable, testing and unstable. You can use the dchroot program to access them. For any inquiries mail debian-admin@lists.debian.org. Accounts on other machines are available on request by contacting LIU Qi liuqi82@gmail.com (Lemote machines).

Credits

This is a list of people who are working on the MIPS port:

Guido Guenther
Aurelien Jarno
Florian Lohoff
Karsten Merker
Martin Michlmayr
Peter De Schrijver
Andi Barth

Contact information

There are a couple of mailing lists dealing with Linux/MIPS and especially Debian on MIPS.

debian-mips@lists.debian.org — This list deals with Debian on MIPS.
Subscribe via mail to debian-mips-request@lists.debian.org.
The archive is at lists.debian.org.
linux-mips@linux-mips.org — This list is for discussions about MIPS kernel supports.
See the Linux/MIPS page for subscription information.

Dedication

Thiemo Seufer, who was the lead MIPS porter in Debian, got killed in a car accident. We dedicate the release of the Debian GNU/Linux lenny distribution to his memory.