Re: 回复: Mips SOC, Linux

["Imre Kaloz" <kaloz@openwrt.org>]

Well, a year before or so I've tried to get a Godson based unit (a  
Municator) with no luck.. I wasn't able to find a contact regarding the  
Lemote, but if you can, I would be also interested in working on this  
platform.

Imre

On Thu, 22 Mar 2007 03:07:49 +0100, Songmao Tian <kingkongmao@gmail.com>  
wrote:

> Have you heard of loongson? the current version of the cpu is 2e,
> while 2f will be released this year, which will clocks at 1GHz,
> delivering rather high perfermance:)
>
> Fulong is a miniPC now based on loongson 2e. you can get one for free
> if you make recognized contribution to the system:)
>
>
> Some introduction here:
> http://www.cyrius.com/debian/loongson/
>
> 2007/3/11, Ralf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org>:
>> On Sun, Mar 11, 2007 at 11:59:11AM +0530, PhilipS wrote:
>>
>> > Hello All,
>> > I am looking for MIPS Development boards for my hobby projects like  
>> Linux
>> > Porting and Development, I am here by looking for an Expert  
>> suggestion to
>> > buy a MIPS custom boards, so far on Google I could come across
>> > vendor selling MIPS Evaluation target boards which is Obviously  
>> expensive
>> > which ,I cannot afford to buy. I hope I am asking this question at the
>> right
>> > place, else please suggest me where I can post my request if one knows
>> about
>> > it.
>>
>> You're touch a big problem here, so I'm going to use this opportunity to
>> post a rant ...
>>
>> Most of the eval boards are have very high price tags due to low volume  
>> and
>> esotheric components such as very large and fast FPGAs or pricey matched
>> impedance connectors for logic analyzers.  Another factor is that the
>> vendors making these boards usually target their commercial customers  
>> and
>> factor in a fairly generous markup for the post-sale support into the  
>> sales
>> price of the board.
>>
>> From a Free Software perspective this is a bloody disaster.  Even if  
>> for a
>> moment I put on my dot com hat again, it's one.  Over the past years the
>> commercial contributions have primarily focused on hardware support.  In
>> many cases I received large code drops of lousy to medicore quality and
>> no maintenance at all after the initial code drop.  I won't go into the
>> reasons here nor do I think I need to name companies here - but it's a  
>> big
>> problem.
>>
>> As usual exceptions proof the rule and also as usual there are alot of
>> grey shades between white and black.  Some companies seem to have  
>> tremendous
>> difficulty to be good open source citizens - but they throw some free
>> hardware into the crowd.  Not enough to satisfy the demand and usually  
>> only
>> a few key people are really able to take advantage of that.
>>
>> Otoh many if not most important and highest quality contributions over  
>> the
>> years have come from hobby hackers, so in the end the lack availability  
>> of
>> modern hardware is making everybody suffer.  Meanwhile the importance of
>> Linux as OS for MIPS is continuing to rise ...
>>
>> I hear similar complaints from other, mostly embedded architectures  
>> such as
>> ARM.  But that's not an excuse - this problem wants some remedy.
>>
>> But let's also look at the options you have right now:
>>
>>  o Eval boards end on ebay relativly rarely, but you can try anyway.
>>    Another option is something like a surplus MIPS workstation.
>>  o A bunch of wireless routers and other devices such as some the  
>> Linksys
>>    WRT54 models have been recycled for hacking use with good success.
>>  o Routerboard which is not yet supported out of tree (working in  
>> cleaing
>>    the patches) would be another reasonably priced option.  Generally  
>> you
>>    may want to look at the list of platforms supported by
>>    http://openwrt.org/ - many of their platforms have friendly price  
>> tags.
>>    Of course alot of those are purpose built hw so may be a bit quirky  
>> to
>>    use.
>>  o Apparently AMD Alchemy boards used to be fairly cheap, on the order  
>> of
>>    $100.  I have not idea this is true or still true for the new owner  
>> of
>>    Alchemy Raza Microelectronics.
>>  o For the meager investment of a few megabytes of disk space Qemu is a
>>    really nice and well performing system which also is rapidly  
>> improving.
>>
>>   Ralf
>>
>>
>