MIPS Port

Overview
Current Status
General Information about
Available Hardware for Debian Developers
Credits
Contacts
Links
Thanks
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 Loongson 3 machines 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. Some Cavium Octeon based machines can switch between both modes in the bootloader.

Given most MIPS machines have 64-bit CPUs, a debian-mips64el port is currently in development and might be released with Debian GNU/Linux 9.

Current Status

Debian GNU/Linux 8.11 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).
MIPS Malta boards (big and little-endian, 32 and 64-bit).
Loongson 2e and 2f machines, including the Yeelong laptop (little-endian).
Loongson 3 machines (little-endian).
Cavium Octeon (big-endian).

In addition to the above machines, it is possible to use Debian on a lot more machines provided that a non-Debian kernel is used. This is for example the case of the MIPS Creator Ci20 development board.

General Information about

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

Available Hardware for Debian Developers

Two machines are made available to Debian developers for MIPS porting work: etler.debian.org (mipsel/mips64el) and minkus.debian.org (mips). The machines have development chroot environments which you can access with schroot. Please see the machine database for more information about these machines.

Credits

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

Andi Barth
Anibal Monsalve Salazar
Aron Xu
Aurelien Jarno
James Cowgill
Yunqiang Su

Contacts

Mailing lists

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

[email protected] — This list deals with Debian on MIPS.
Subscribe via mail to [email protected].
The archive is at lists.debian.org.
[email protected] — This list is for discussions about MIPS kernel supports.
See the Linux/MIPS page for subscription information.

IRC

You can find us on IRC on irc.debian.org on the channel #debian-mips.

Thanks

The porterboxes and most of the build servers for the mips and mipsel architectures are provided by Imagination Technologies.

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.