MIPS64/Known Issues

Run from RAM

At present, not much work has been done on run from RAM, because many of the Octeon boards do not have named memory blocks support, which is necessary to use an initramfs under Cavium Executive.

For those which do support named memory blocks, you can load an initramfs into one and then specify it as rd_name=initramfs on the kernel command line.

Floating Point

The MIPS64 port is soft-float, because many of the CPUs we are targeting have broken FPUs. This causes problems with math applications, such as those dependent on OpenBLAS. Similarly, binaries that are compiled with -mhard-float can't be linked on Alpine MIPS64. We may do a hard-float port later.

Go

Go itself works fine on MIPS64, but many libraries which make syscalls directly either assume that MIPS environments are 32-bit or do not have code for making syscalls on MIPS at all. As such, many Go packages are presently blocked on MIPS64. The solution is to fix the Go libraries, unfortunately Go does not make this easy to do.