Dropping mips architecture for bullseye and sid

Aurelien Jarno <[email protected]> Sat, 20 Jul 2019 12:46:54 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.ports.mips
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

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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