Debian Dropping Its 32-bit MIPS Little Endian "mipsel" Port

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Debian Dropping Its 32-bit MIPS Little Endian "mipsel" Port

Debian developers will be discontinuing their 32-bit MIPS little-endian "mipsel" CPU architecture port moving forward...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-Dropping-MIPSEL

[Veto]

I would have thought of it mainly being used for old SGI workstations. Routers are too constrained to be running Debian and are likely running something like OpenWRT instead.
However, it is understandable they don't want to spend manpower on such museum pieces. They should run their original OS anyway

[Redfoxmoon]

I have debian mipsel 32-bit running on a chinesium routerboard, it runs great but it's constrained to an older kernel as the kernel FPU emulator was apparently without warning removed

[stormcrow]

I have debian mipsel 32-bit running on a chinesium routerboard, it runs great but it's constrained to an older kernel as the kernel FPU emulator was apparently without warning removed

Memory constrained devices can't use the FPU emulator as it's apparently too big to fit in available RAM in old devices. From what I've read on the issue, the problem is the MIPS spec. Much of the FPU section is not very specific with a lot of optional components. Dealing with that kind of mess has complexity consequences in software. Sometimes tossing hardware out is the right thing to do, even if it still functions.

To be more clear, it just seems that how upstream Linux decided to handle FPU emulation changed, it wasn't removed per se. But because of memory constraints, downstream distros decided to turn it off. Or my information on MIPS itself is antiquated... wouldn't be the first time with the problems with Linux documentation.

[Redfoxmoon]

Memory constrained devices can't use the FPU emulator as it's apparently too big to fit in available RAM in old devices. From what I've read on the issue, the problem is the MIPS spec. Much of the FPU section is not very specific with a lot of optional components. Dealing with that kind of mess has complexity consequences in software. Sometimes tossing hardware out is the right thing to do, even if it still functions.

To be more clear, it just seems that how upstream Linux decided to handle FPU emulation changed, it wasn't removed per se. But because of memory constraints, downstream distros decided to turn it off. Or my information on MIPS itself is antiquated... wouldn't be the first time with the problems with Linux documentation.

No, the FPU emulator is missing entirely, the expected route now is to use gcc's softfloat library for mips(el) without fpu in hardware - debian is built with hardfloat

[Developer12]

This is pretty surprising. Pretty sure there are still 32-bit MIPS SoCs rolling off production lines and into new devices. There aren't a lot of new faster cores coming out but afaik it's still pretty popular.

I suppose this is going to be bad news for any debian-derived distros that try to support MIPS networking equipment, SBCs, or other embedded systems. Hopefully it spurs some action and some maintainers step up to fix the y2038 problem.

A 2GB memory limit for userspace is pretty much never going to be an issue on any commonly available MIPS hardware. I don't think any MIPS device has ever shipped in volume with that much RAM, and I don't expect many future devices to either. Most MIPS networking devices probably ship with no more than 512MB, max.

[esbeeb]

You can't make everybody happy. I for one, support these pragmatic choices, which take into consideration the limited available person-power. As long as there are at least a few architecture choices - and well-supported ones at that - then it's not like there aren't lots of good substitutes to turn to.

[shmerl]

Good! I think this one stalled a ton of packages for a long time due to Meson having issues with it. Less problems going forward.

[mlau]

No, the FPU emulator is missing entirely, the expected route now is to use gcc's softfloat library for mips(el) without fpu in hardware - debian is built with hardfloat

It's still there, you need to select CONFIG_MIPS_FP_SUPPORT=y to get it built into the kernel.

[mos87]

a chinesium routerboard

what's that?