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  • Dropping mips architecture for bullseye and sid

    From Aurelien Jarno@21:1/5 to All on Sat Jul 20 12:50:01 2019
    Dear all,

    The mips architecture, supporting 32-bit big-endian MIPS CPUs, has
    been supported in Debian for more than 15 years. Due to the limited 2GB
    virtual address space and due to the fact this architecture is one of
    the last big-endian architecture Debian supports, the porting effort
    is increasingly difficult. On the other hand the interest for this
    architecture is going down, and with it the human resources available
    for porting is going down.

    Now that buster has been released, it is probably time to drop this architecture from bullseye and sid. Unless there is a sudden interest
    for this architecture, that is commitment from some new porters and new hardware for the build daemons, the plan is to ask for the ftpmasters
    to drop this architecture in about 4 weeks. Note that many recent
    MIPS hardware support endian switching at runtime and can therefore be supported by the mipsel or mips64el ports. This is the case for example
    of the Octeon CPUs.

    Note that this *only concerns bullseye and sid*. The mips architecture
    will still be available for stretch for roughly 1 more year, and for
    buster for roughly 3 more years.

    Aurelien, on behalf of the MIPS porters

    --
    Aurelien Jarno GPG: 4096R/1DDD8C9B [email protected] http://www.aurel32.net

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  • From Mathieu Malaterre@21:1/5 to [email protected] on Mon Jul 22 10:30:02 2019
    Salut Aurélien !

    On Sat, Jul 20, 2019 at 12:47 PM Aurelien Jarno <[email protected]> wrote:

    Dear all,

    The mips architecture, supporting 32-bit big-endian MIPS CPUs, has
    been supported in Debian for more than 15 years. Due to the limited 2GB virtual address space and due to the fact this architecture is one of
    the last big-endian architecture Debian supports, the porting effort
    is increasingly difficult. On the other hand the interest for this architecture is going down, and with it the human resources available
    for porting is going down.

    Thanks for your dedication these last years.

    Now that buster has been released, it is probably time to drop this architecture from bullseye and sid. Unless there is a sudden interest
    for this architecture, that is commitment from some new porters and new hardware for the build daemons, the plan is to ask for the ftpmasters
    to drop this architecture in about 4 weeks.

    In other words, mips is not going to debian-ports ?

    Note that many recent
    MIPS hardware support endian switching at runtime and can therefore be supported by the mipsel or mips64el ports. This is the case for example
    of the Octeon CPUs.

    Note that this *only concerns bullseye and sid*. The mips architecture
    will still be available for stretch for roughly 1 more year, and for
    buster for roughly 3 more years.

    Aurelien, on behalf of the MIPS porters

    --
    Aurelien Jarno GPG: 4096R/1DDD8C9B [email protected] http://www.aurel32.net



    --
    Mathieu

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    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Aurelien Jarno@21:1/5 to Mathieu Malaterre on Mon Jul 22 19:30:02 2019
    Salut,

    On 2019-07-22 10:24, Mathieu Malaterre wrote:
    Salut Aur�lien !

    On Sat, Jul 20, 2019 at 12:47 PM Aurelien Jarno <[email protected]> wrote:

    Dear all,

    The mips architecture, supporting 32-bit big-endian MIPS CPUs, has
    been supported in Debian for more than 15 years. Due to the limited 2GB virtual address space and due to the fact this architecture is one of
    the last big-endian architecture Debian supports, the porting effort
    is increasingly difficult. On the other hand the interest for this architecture is going down, and with it the human resources available
    for porting is going down.

    Thanks for your dedication these last years.

    Now that buster has been released, it is probably time to drop this architecture from bullseye and sid. Unless there is a sudden interest
    for this architecture, that is commitment from some new porters and new hardware for the build daemons, the plan is to ask for the ftpmasters
    to drop this architecture in about 4 weeks.

    In other words, mips is not going to debian-ports ?

    If there are nobody taking care of the port, nor hardware for the build daemons, the port will become unusable in a few months or even in a few
    weeks given the rate of changes currently happening in sid. I therefore
    do not see the point of moving it to debian-ports.

    Aurelien

    --
    Aurelien Jarno GPG: 4096R/1DDD8C9B [email protected] http://www.aurel32.net

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