Re: Roll call for porters of architectures in sid and testing (Status update)
Hi all. The 1st October is rapidly approaching, so I thought I'd better put a more formal place marker down for IMGs support of Debian MIPS. A couple of my guys have asked for some information on what will be involved, but have no reply yet. Whist we sort out the new hires and get my present team onto this, I'll fill out Niels' template to give you a placeholder for the MIPS arches at least: Hi, I am an (the manager/group leader of) active porter(s) for the following architectures and I intend to continue this for the lifetime of the jessie release: For mips and mipsel we will, at minimum, - test all packages on this architecture (working on this...) - fix toolchain issues (I have direct access to the IMG/MIPS gcc compiler team) - triage arch-specific bugs - fix arch-related bugs I am not a DD/DM, but we intend to have DD/DM's working for us rsn Graham Whaley If there are still some requirements you believe we will be missing (such as running buildd's etc.) then let me know, as I will do everything in my power to solve any issues. I am about to email the DSA team to discuss the present mips/mipsel hardware situation so we can fix that as well. Graham On 24 September 2013 17:38, Graham Whaley graham.wha...@gmail.com wrote: Hi David. Good timing. I needed to update everybody on the status. I now have allocation for two full time permanent hires for Debian MIPS work in my group, and will be placing those job adverts on the imgtec web site as soon as I can (in the next few days), and posting those links to the debian-jobs mailing list. I also have allocation for MIPS native build hardware. I need to discuss the present situation of the MIPS hardware within Debian, and how we can proceed to improve that situation. I've not identified who within Debian I need to discuss this with - if anybody could point me in the right direction or contact me directly then that would be very appreciated. In the interim a couple of my team should be contacting the Debian Release Team so we can resource MIPS for jessie whilst we get the new team formed and up to speed. Graham On 24 September 2013 15:25, David Kuehling dvdkh...@posteo.de wrote: [added CC to debian-mips, please don't shoot me for cross-posting] Graham == Graham Whaley graham.wha...@gmail.com writes: I need to update you on the state of Debian support commitment within Imagination, particularly in light of the plight of MIPS support for jessie. Having become aware of this situation, I am working internally to accelerate Imaginations existing Debian support group plans. This will cover both engineering resource and hardware availability. It will take a few days for us to work this through, and as soon as I have some news I will post to this list. Hi Graham, nice to hear that there is somebody still interested in Debian-mips. Already started thinking I'd end up with a non-supported software for my MIPS hardware in the long-run. [..] For those of you who wish to do some mips/mipsel work or testing (thanks :-), but are short of hardware, I'll see what I can do there as well. Let me know if you are interested Given the seemingly dormant interest in Debian MIPS I'll see whether I can allocate more time myself to help with porting and fixing. I'm already eying Loongson-3A based hardware (heard that Lemote has Mini-ITX boards available) to replace/augment my Fuloong 6004 system. For MIPS-enthusiasts: tekmote is currently selling quadcore MIPS64 notebooks for 600 EUR: http://www.tekmote.nl/epages/61504599.sf/nl_NL/?ObjectPath=/Shops/61504599/Products/CFL-008 IMO without a Debian MIPS64 port, Debian won't be viable for high end MIPS equipment before soon, and is going to loose a lot of interested developers. cheers, David -- GnuPG public key: http://dvdkhlng.users.sourceforge.net/dk2.gpg Fingerprint: B63B 6AF2 4EEB F033 46F7 7F1D 935E 6F08 E457 205F
Re: DSA concerns for jessie architectures - mips/mipsel
Hi DSA, all. I'd like to respond to your call for help regards the release qualification matrix, in particular for hardware (buildd and porter machines), and in particular for mips and mipsel arch. I wish to work with you to remedy some of the listed issues. I've started working with MIPS hardware vendors on availability and pricing of hardware. Having researched your current mips/mipsel setup and the requirements for jessie, the issues as I see them, and hopefully solutions, are: 1) reliability. Corelli and Gabrielli are unstable. I saw the thread way back where they were investigated, but it seems un-fixable (and the machines are now rather old). Let's work on replacing both of those, and maybe Lucatelli as well, as it appears to be the same hardware (but possibly stable?). 2) supportability. We'll work on this to see what the options are. I'm sure we all want boxes that can be maintained/replaced easily. 3) speed. I see 'mips' (but not mipsel in particular) listed as 'too slow'. Sure, Can somebody point me at some indication of the minimum requirement here (not that I'm particularly aiming at the minimum, I just wish to ensure we reach it :-). And, is this just pure single-multi-core/thread-machine speed, or is it a solvable problem by using multiple machines if necessary ? 4) I see there is a note about an 'opcode implementation error' for a mipsel porter box. Sounds like a new machine(s) is needed there as well. Could somebody point me at some data on the opcode issue (more out of interest really...). From the three types of machines I see you currently have I believe there are more modern versions of all of those, and possibly some others. I believe we will be able to locate hardware to solve the issues. Thanks, Graham -- Software Design Manager, MIPS platforms Imagination Technologies
Re: Roll call for porters of architectures in sid and testing (Status update)
Hi David. Good timing. I needed to update everybody on the status. I now have allocation for two full time permanent hires for Debian MIPS work in my group, and will be placing those job adverts on the imgtec web site as soon as I can (in the next few days), and posting those links to the debian-jobs mailing list. I also have allocation for MIPS native build hardware. I need to discuss the present situation of the MIPS hardware within Debian, and how we can proceed to improve that situation. I've not identified who within Debian I need to discuss this with - if anybody could point me in the right direction or contact me directly then that would be very appreciated. In the interim a couple of my team should be contacting the Debian Release Team so we can resource MIPS for jessie whilst we get the new team formed and up to speed. Graham On 24 September 2013 15:25, David Kuehling dvdkh...@posteo.de wrote: [added CC to debian-mips, please don't shoot me for cross-posting] Graham == Graham Whaley graham.wha...@gmail.com writes: I need to update you on the state of Debian support commitment within Imagination, particularly in light of the plight of MIPS support for jessie. Having become aware of this situation, I am working internally to accelerate Imaginations existing Debian support group plans. This will cover both engineering resource and hardware availability. It will take a few days for us to work this through, and as soon as I have some news I will post to this list. Hi Graham, nice to hear that there is somebody still interested in Debian-mips. Already started thinking I'd end up with a non-supported software for my MIPS hardware in the long-run. [..] For those of you who wish to do some mips/mipsel work or testing (thanks :-), but are short of hardware, I'll see what I can do there as well. Let me know if you are interested Given the seemingly dormant interest in Debian MIPS I'll see whether I can allocate more time myself to help with porting and fixing. I'm already eying Loongson-3A based hardware (heard that Lemote has Mini-ITX boards available) to replace/augment my Fuloong 6004 system. For MIPS-enthusiasts: tekmote is currently selling quadcore MIPS64 notebooks for 600 EUR: http://www.tekmote.nl/epages/61504599.sf/nl_NL/?ObjectPath=/Shops/61504599/Products/CFL-008 IMO without a Debian MIPS64 port, Debian won't be viable for high end MIPS equipment before soon, and is going to loose a lot of interested developers. cheers, David -- GnuPG public key: http://dvdkhlng.users.sourceforge.net/dk2.gpg Fingerprint: B63B 6AF2 4EEB F033 46F7 7F1D 935E 6F08 E457 205F
Re: Re: Roll call for porters of architectures in sid and testing (Status update)
Hi Niels, all. First, I should introduce myself. I run Imagination/MIPS internal Linux kernel and distribution groups. I need to update you on the state of Debian support commitment within Imagination, particularly in light of the plight of MIPS support for jessie. Having become aware of this situation, I am working internally to accelerate Imaginations existing Debian support group plans. This will cover both engineering resource and hardware availability. It will take a few days for us to work this through, and as soon as I have some news I will post to this list. Obviously it will take some time to make new hires, and in the interim I will allocate some resource from my existing group to cover the gaps. These are experienced kernel and distro guys. Once I've got more info then we'll do some introductions and get some hardware rolling. I'd also like to discuss how we sort out the server hardware requirements once I've done a bit more research (trying to find the best platform for the task). Niels, is there a specific person or group I can discuss this with? For those of you who wish to do some mips/mipsel work or testing (thanks :-), but are short of hardware, I'll see what I can do there as well. Let me know if you are interested Any questions then fire away. Let's get this sorted out for the long term. Graham (also graham.whaley -at- imgtec.com)
