14 DAY TRIAL // Michal Toman, a Fedora developer known for his work on ABRT (Automatic Bug Reporting Tool), as well as the PowerPC (PPC) and s390 ports of the operating system, has posted a message on the Fedora Linux mailing list, announcing that he wants to revive the MIPS port of Fedora.
Apparently, this is an informative message to current Fedora developers who wish to collaborate on the MIPS port of the acclaimed Linux kernel-based operating system, because Michal Toman has an on-going collaboration with Imagination Technologies, a British-based semiconductor R&D and licencing company, to bring back Fedora to the MIPS architecture.
"For the last few months however, I have been collaborating with Imagination Technologies to bring back Fedora for MIPS," says Michal Toman. "Anyway, we have now arrived into a state where Fedora mips64el userspace can be booted and played with. [...] Hopefully you will like Fedora MIPS back."
The developer reminds us that work on Fedora for MIPS started a couple of years ago but was discontinued because of lack of interest. At that point in time, they managed to create various RPM packages that were using the hybrid n32 ABI with 32-bit pointers and 64-bit data, despite that fact that they were tagged with the mips64el architecture.
The first QEMU image is now available for testing
As such, work began several months ago to bootstrap the Fedora Linux distribution from scratch, based on n64 rather than n32. Michal Toman reports that the RPM packages build surprisingly well, and the first QEMU image is now available for download and testing for anyone who wants to try Fedora for MIPS.
Besides the mips64el port of the distribution, the developer is currently working on the 32-bit mipsel port as well, which can be used on the MIPS Creator CI20 board, a fully featured and high-performance Linux and Android development platform. In time, the ultimate goal is to have a fully fledged MIPS port of Fedora Linux, so any help is more than welcome.