Re: Debian/MIPSeb: proposal to drop mipseb port?

On Tue, Jul 10, 2018 at 2:28 PM Mathieu Malaterre <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jul 9, 2018 at 12:47 PM YunQiang Su <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > Mathieu Malaterre <[email protected]> 于2018年7月9日周一 下午6:31写道：
> > >
> > > On Mon, Jul 9, 2018 at 12:12 PM YunQiang Su <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Adi Kriegisch <[email protected]> 于2018年7月9日周一 下午4:34写道：
> > > > >
> > > > > Hi!
> > > > >
> > > > > > due to lack of enough man power and build machines for 3 mips* port at
> > > > > > the same time, I think that now it is time for us to have a talk about
> > > > > > dropping mips32eb support now.
> > > > > [...]
> > > > > > In fact I don't know anybody is using Debian's mips32eb port.
> > > > > > If you are using it, please tell us.
> > > > > I am using mips32eb a lot on wifi routers (self-compiled kernel with
> > > > > rootfs on a usb stick). There are some people here at a community
> > > > > wireless network that do use such setups on their rooftops as well.
> > > > >
> > > >
> > > > What is the advantage of eb than el? better performance?
> > > > I guess most of CPUs support both eb and el.
> > > >
> > > > > Please let me know if there is anything I could do to help avoiding the
> > > > > drop.
> > > > >
> > > >
> > > > We need some more build machines, current we use some ER8s,
> > > > which use NFS as rootfs and they have no FPU.
> > > > So the performance and stability are bad.
> > >
> > > Just for reference why is mips (mips32eb) not build from an mips64el
> > > machine (with FPU) ? All i386 (AFAIK) packages are build from amd64
> > > these days (same is true for ppc32 on ppc64).
> >
> > mipsel packages do build on mips64el machines,
> > while mips aka mips32eb cannot.
>
> Sorry to insist, but I thought mips & mipsel in Debian were both
> MIPS32r2. So what makes mips32eb so special for MIPS64r6 ?
>

Because mips32eb is big endian, while MIPS hardware does not support
switching endianess at runtime, if I understand correctly mips64el
hardware can do native build for mipsel binaries but cannot do the
same for mips(32eb).

Regards,
Aron