[Dev] Porting Lemote Yeeloong

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Fri, 15 Oct 2021 19:57:51 +0200
Jan Prunk <janprunk at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
Hi,

> I am interested if there are still any users with Lemote Yeeloong
> computers? This computer was supported with gNewSense. Denis "GNUtoo"
> suggested that the mips64el port could be revived for Parabola, what
> do others think, is it worth doing that? 
I also pointed that it would probably require some work to do that,
especially to fix the packages that don't build or don't run well on
mips64el, because I assume that statically we are more likely to have
issues like that than with x86_64 but you also never know without
trying. If we're lucky it could affect only a small subset of packages.

> I guess it doesn't make much sense reviving it, if there are very few
> users who still have and would use such a computer?
The question would also be what hardware would be capable of running
mips64el binaries, and how many people already have MIPS64 capable
hardware, or who would be willing to get MIPS64 compatible hardware to
work on Parabola and actually do work.

And if there is some interest, we probably need to build some
community around that that is bigger than just old Lemote computer
users, because most Parabola contributors are probably already busy
and/or don't have Lemote computers anymore[2], and given how slow old
Lemote laptops are, I fear that not many users still use them. Though
if we get some new contributors through that and that the MIPS port is
self sustainable, it might be worth it.

LibreCMC supports many devices with MIPS CPUs, but I fear that most if
not all are 32bit CPUs. Newer lemotes could also be relevant.

I've started to compile information on that in a wiki page[1] in the
Libreplanet wiki (which is FSDG distribution neutral) in order to
understand what hardware we could support if the mips64el architecture
was revived.

Guix also supports the mips64el architecture for cross compiling
packages. In the past I tried to compile the hello world for mips64el
and that worked fine, but I couldn't test it because my WiFi access
point CPU was probably 32bit.

References:
-----------
[1]https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Hardware/research/CPU_Architectures/MIPS
[2]https://www.parabola.nu/news/parabola-support-for-mips64el-discontinued/

Denis.
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