From owner-freebsd-mips@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Dec 28 18:10:01 2007 Return-Path: Delivered-To: mips@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A073816A418 for ; Fri, 28 Dec 2007 18:10:01 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from imp@bsdimp.com) Received: from harmony.bsdimp.com (bsdimp.com [199.45.160.85]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4A24713C457 for ; Fri, 28 Dec 2007 18:10:01 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from imp@bsdimp.com) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by harmony.bsdimp.com (8.14.1/8.14.1) with ESMTP id lBSI3koK075143 for ; Fri, 28 Dec 2007 11:03:46 -0700 (MST) (envelope-from imp@bsdimp.com) Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2007 11:08:33 -0700 (MST) Message-Id: <20071228.110833.-1540394315.imp@bsdimp.com> To: mips@freebsd.org From: "M. Warner Losh" X-Mailer: Mew version 5.2 on Emacs 21.3 / Mule 5.0 (SAKAKI) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Subject: The path ahead X-BeenThere: freebsd-mips@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Porting FreeBSD to MIPS List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2007 18:10:01 -0000 I started talking about this plan on irc, but then realized that it might be better to hash out here so there's a better record of it. As you may know, Juniper Networks recently released a reference implementation of a MIPS port to FreeBSD. This is currently in the perforce repository as //depot/vendor/juniper/juniper-mips/. It is based on FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE and looks to be pretty good as far as it goes. It is based on a port that runs in Juniper's custom hardware, but has had all the proprietary bits stripped out, including all the CPU specific code. The only driver it supports is sio, but doesn't run on real hardware... As you may also know, there's been a community effort to do a mips port. This effort has been running, to various degrees, on different MIPS hardware. There's a number of branches off of mips2, both public and private, that implement some addition hardware. This port has lots of drivers. I'd propose that create a new branch to merge these two items. I propose the name //depot/project/mips2-jnpr to indicate that the branch pulls in from both. I don't want to argue over names, so unless you really feel strongly, I'll do this. The advantage of doing this in a new branch in p4 is that we'll be able to call a 'mulligan' if we somehow realize we're down the wrong path. I'd also propose we pull in as much as possible from the juniper-mips code and adapt our code to it. Except we should likely keep our platform interface. That's one area where we've started to progress in supporting multiple mips platforms. The Juniper code is very much for one platform and has a few places where the base mips code and the platform specific code is smashed together. Comments? Warner