Subject: I am looking for a mips machine

From: "H . J . Lu" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 08:03:56 -0700

Hi,

I am looking for a mips machine to continue working on my mips port
of RedHat. My requirements are

1. It has the stable, up to date kernel support. That means I can do

# ./configure
# make bootstrap
# make check

for gcc 3.1 without a kernel oops.

2. It has decent CPU. I hate to wait a day for

# make bootstrap

3. Inexpensive.

4. Support serial console.

5. Little endian is preferred.

Does anyone have any recommendations?

Thanks.

H.J.

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From: James Simmons <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 11:19:27 -0700 (PDT)

> Does anyone have any recommendations?

I use a Cobalt Qube for alot of my developement. It works fine. I know it
is not in Ralph's tree yet but I plan to send him my work soon.

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From: "H . J . Lu" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 12:19:44 -0700

> is not in Ralph's tree yet but I plan to send him my work soon.

I think Cobalt Qube is slow and is hard to expand the memory. I need at
least 128MB RAM. Also the current mips kernel doesn't support it.

H.J.

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From: James Simmons <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 13:16:07 -0700 (PDT)

> I think Cobalt Qube is slow and is hard to expand the memory. 

Slow that it is. As for memory it has two banks for 72 pin memory. I want
to add memory to the Qube I have.

> Also the current mips kernel doesn't support it.

In the CVS tree I have it works and this tree is against Ralph's tree.

---

From: "H . J . Lu" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 13:24:35 -0700

> to add memory to the Qube I have.

I have access to a Raq 2. But it won't take my old EDO SIMMs :-). Besides,
it only supports an 2.2 kernel.

H.J.

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From: James Simmons <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 13:28:50 -0700 (PDT)

> I have access to a Raq 2. But it won't take my old EDO SIMMs :-). 

That sucks. Have you have any luck with any memory chips?

> Besides, it only supports an 2.2 kernel.

jsimmons@borgcube:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
cpu                     : MIPS
cpu model               : Nevada V10.0
system type             : Cobalt Microserver 27
BogoMIPS                : 249.85
byteorder               : little endian
unaligned accesses      : 0
wait instruction        : yes
microsecond timers      : yes
extra interrupt vector  : yes
hardware watchpoint     : no
VCED exceptions         : not available
VCEI exceptions         : not available
jsimmons@borgcube:~$ uname -nr
borgcube 2.4.10-mips
jsimmons@borgcube:~$

Actually I need to migrate the code to the new time and pci code. I will
be sending a diff to Ralph in the next few days.

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From: Taco IJsselmuiden <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 22:30:36 +0200 (CEST)

> it only supports an 2.2 kernel.
well, nog exactly:

I've got a Raq 2 running 2.4.7-pre6 + pty-support here, running for 79
days now...
don't know exacty which patches i used, but i think i can figure it out,
if you like...
at least one of the patches is named 'linux-2.4.7-pre6-mips-cobalt-v1.patch'
;))

it's currently used as a simpel web-server for development/test stuff.

i could supply more info if you like that....

Cheers,
Taco.

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From: "J. Scott Kasten" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 16:42:06 -0400

My general impression is that your looking for a "FAST" board, and a
little endian board make for mutually exclusive requirements.  Not that
little endian couldn't be fast, but just about every piece of hardware
I've seen running little endian has used one of the lesser mips chips in
it where they've cut corners multiplexing address and data over the same
pins and so forth.  Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but of all the ones
I've looked at, the little endian boards had the less capable hardware to
boot.  I think that's because the market was being driven by these little
Win CE things, and CE only supports little endian.

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From: Pete Popov <[email-masked]>
Date: 24 Oct 2001 14:00:15 -0700

> Win CE things, and CE only supports little endian.

Well, not quite. Linux supports LE too but the choice of LE mips desktop
systems is limited.

The fastest LE cpu/board I've worked with is the Alchemy Au1000 part
running at 396MHz. The board doesn't have and IDE or SCSI controller
though. However, it has pcmcia and we've added support for their pcmcia
controller, so I was able to use a Hitachi 2GB pcmcia ata card (looks
like the IBM Microdrive).  That might be one option for reasonably fast
native compiles.

Pete

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From: Jun Sun <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 14:24:38 -0700

> Does anyone have any recommendations?

It appears Malta from MIPS and Ocelot Dev box from Momentum should fit your
need.  I think both would cost about $3000 a piece though.

Jun

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From: Geert Uytterhoeven <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2001 09:57:46 +0200 (MEST)

> Win CE things, and CE only supports little endian.

You can try a NEC DDBxxxx evaluation board with VR5000. They have jumpers to
select endianness, but I never got them to work in big-endian mode.

> > least 128MB RAM. Also the current mips kernel doesn't support it.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

						Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- [email-masked]

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
							    -- Linus Torvalds

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From: Carsten Langgaard <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2001 10:28:18 +0200

Hi,

I promised you a Malta some time ago, but we have been short on the
boards.
We should get some in the very near future, so I hope to be able to send
you a board.
You can run the board in both endianness.
I can probably not give you a very fast system at the moment, but
hopefully when we have some faster CPUs, I can ship a faster daughter
card.

/Carsten

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