Talk:MIPS64
Please keep
Hi,
please, please, please don't delete the page or the archived binaries etc.
Hardware
Availability
There's 10000's of SmartNICs based on this CPU that are being obsoleted at various cloud providers. They're very cheap to obtain, I've seen them as low as $6 for a 25G model with 16Cores/16GB Ram, and even the more expensive offers are a good value. There's even an OpenWRT user who just was silly about it and bought 50 for $2 each.
So the availability has changed.
Good models
- CN6640 (Dual/Quad 10G, 12 Core?, 8/16GB via DDR3 SODIMM)
- CN2300/CN7322 (Dualport 10G / Dualport 25G, 12 / 16 Core, 16GB)
- CN7890 (Dualport 40G, 24/32 Core, 32GB)
Some even have 2x SATA 3.0 :-)
Complexity
It's complicated
The complexity of course hasn't changed, much. it's still a large undertaking to get the cards to run your own OS, and their OSS history is certainly not a shining light. There's no public user manual for the cards, a SDK is NDAed and you need to pick up scraps to get it working. I'm failing at making it work. But I fancy to think I'm failing forward.
Much of the complicated stuff is just toil/churn of kicking out the vendor toolchain - and they're even helping on that end. But it is much nonetheless.
Accordingly, it makes sense to not have the architecture supported by default.
architecture revival feasible
Once enough of them have leaked out, it will be very feasible for the community to contribute and revive the port. At extremely slow pace, the vendor has upstreamed most parts for both Linux and U-Boot and as such, the situtation is less horrible than a few years ago. The gaps are getting smaller and easier to step over. As such it is a really nice tinkering platform, and in some sense it's even more open, or at least more open to be investigated than the easier to obtain alternatives like Ubiquiti routers.
The only holdup is the sparse documentation and if we just have a clear warning then it should be hopefully OK to keep all the traces of this architecture support around?
leftover work
From what I read on the page, the situation around Go is very bad; some more things seem to involve autotools (a nightmare solo but tolerable for many) and, lastly, the FPU. I would guess only the FPU part is really something where it matters if it gets attention or not. I gotta check what the situation on Debian look(s|ed) like, but it's also something that could become less of a problem as progress happens.
Other uses
To be clear, the cards work in Alpine as normal 25G NICs, but it would be a lot more fun to also run Alpine ON them.