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

Hi Matt,

On 2018-08-11 22:46, Matt Turner wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 21, 2018 at 12:18 PM J.P.Malhado <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, 9 Jul 2018 18:13:43 +0800, YunQiang Su wrote:
> > > 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.
> >
> > I'm commenting here from a position of ignorance:
> > Would SGI hardware make good build machines for the architecture? I'm asking
> > because I have a 3 SGI Octanes I could give away.
> 
> Doubtful. Octanes use hundreds of watts and aren't very fast compared
> with modern systems. They are indeed big endian, however.
> 
> Debian used to have some Broadcom SWARM (BCM91250A) systems. They're
> bootable as big or little endian (controllable with a jumper on the
> motherboard). I have some that I attempt to use for Gentoo, but
> they're unstable and their kernel support seems to be totally
> unmaintained.
> 
> Aurelien, do you know what happened to those systems? I don't see them
> listed here: https://wiki.debian.org/MIPSPort#Build_daemons_.26_porter_boxes
> 
> (Gentoo would love your hand-me-downs if you're no longer using them :)

Debian indeed used to have some of those as build daemons, but they all
died one by one. I don't remember the exact details for all of them, but
I remember I spent time during Debconf in Portland to fix one, which
started to crash before the end of the CFE boot.

I remember the original CPU fan was of quite bad quality and that they
were also quite picky about memory modules and IDE disks.

Aurelien