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ddc
Guru
Joined: 29 Aug 2006
Posts: 522
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 Posted: Sun Dec 16, 2007 1:16 pm Post subject: mips board |
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hi,
i am still looking for a good mips board
I know about routerboard-mips (a boards targeted at companies that wants to produce consumer ADSL routers and such), but these boards aren't exactly common on the market, also i realize there's not a big demand for a distribution such as Gentoo on them.
The routerboard i am working with has only (soldered) 64Mb of ram and miniPCI expandability, so i think Gentoo tends to see more enthusiast use than commercial, especially on MIPS.
so i'd like to know what are the mips board gentoo is aiming for ?
('cause i'd like to collaborate sharing the mips-fun)
regards |
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MorpheuS.Ibis
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 22 Apr 2006
Posts: 143
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| Posted: Sun Dec 16, 2007 1:59 pm Post subject: |
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i guess that routerboards are not really designed for server usage (well, maybe the rb1000 that is about to come out) so there is no real point of running gentoo on them as they are targeted for routing and mikrotik makes a perfect OS for them... the rb532A (that is probably the one you have in your hands) could be usable as minimal server with a large CF card...
but again, routerboard is not designed for server usage as they have almost no disk space...
EDIT: gentoo/mips project is mainly aimed to SGI machines, so that should be the choice for mips hardware  |
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ddc
Guru
Joined: 29 Aug 2006
Posts: 522
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| Posted: Sun Dec 16, 2007 4:19 pm Post subject: |
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| MorpheuS.Ibis wrote: | the rb532A (that is probably the one you have in your hands) could be usable as minimal server with a large CF card...
but again, routerboard is not designed for server usage as they have almost no disk space...
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e.x.a.c.t.l.y. !
i am running the RB532A (the one with 64Mb, not the one with 32Mb) with a stripped mipsel-gentoo stored on a 4Gb-CFA-microdrive: this board is quite pretty, the CFA is as fast as 6Mbyte/sec could be considered "fast", and the 64Mb are as enough as this stripped gentoo can fit the ram with what i launch from the console (i mean i will never launch an emerge --update world, the system will die)
well, the rb532A satisfies the need to have a mipsel low cost machine to be experienced with (i am studying RISC machines at my university, so i love to have a real hardware, not emulators like SPIM, to be practiced with), but this board is not exactly what i am looking for !
and this is the reason i am here to ask you: are there "good" MIPS board ?
could you suggest me ?
| Quote: | | EDIT: gentoo/mips project is mainly aimed to SGI machines, so that should be the choice for mips hardware |
i run gentoo on sgi indy/impact/octane: none of them are really "good" to be considered for the future: 'cause they are old design machine, not modern, not expandible
- indy (max 256MB RAM, sim 72, slow) and impact (max 1Gb RAM, sim72, slow and hard to be found ... see http://www.webalice.it/mr.ddc/machine/sgi-impact-1Gb-ram.html ) have got a dedicated GIO32/64 bus: so slow machine not expandable !
- octane2 (max 8Gb RAM, dimm, quite fast, quite easy to be found, quite cheap) has the pci cartridge expansion (expensive, hard to be found, not well supported by the actual sgi-mips-kernel), but the XIO24-to-pci (the feature this cartridge adds to your octane workstation) is not so friendly and usable: not really usable by any pci cards (matrox doesn't work, sata doesn't work, usb may work, firewire doesn't work, etc ...)
i am looking for a modern MIPS board with PCI slot, socketed ram
is there anything "good" ?
Last edited by ddc on Sun Dec 16, 2007 6:25 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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MorpheuS.Ibis
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 22 Apr 2006
Posts: 143
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| Posted: Sun Dec 16, 2007 5:42 pm Post subject: |
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| ddc wrote: | i am looking for a modern MIPS board with PCI slot, socketed ram
is there anything "good" ? |
wikipedia says that the most powerful MIPS processors are R10000, R12000, R14000 and R16000 used in SGI cluster/servers some years ago.
but they are probably really hard to get and way too expensive.
i don't have any real experience with non-x86 archs (hard to get around here, not counting routerboards and other embedded mips or PPC, ARM PDAs with linux support and gaming consoles) so i can tell you nothing you couldn't get from google... |
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widan
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Joined: 07 Jun 2005
Posts: 1512
Location: Paris, France
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| Posted: Wed Dec 26, 2007 4:34 pm Post subject: |
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| ddc wrote: | | i run gentoo on sgi indy/impact/octane: none of them are really "good" to be considered for the future: 'cause they are old design machine, not modern, not expandible |
Another problem is the heat and noise output, which can be quite high for the more powerful machines. For Octanes the PCI card cage is impossible to find and was only really meant for some specific cards provided by SGI (mostly SCSI and Fiber Channel for disk arrays).
| ddc wrote: | | I am looking for a modern MIPS board with PCI slot, socketed ram is there anything "good" ? |
The Broadcom Swarm (BCM91250A) board has a 800 MHz dual core MIPS SB-1 CPU, PCI64 and DDR RAM. Or the PMC Sequoia reference board (1GHz single core, PCI32, DDR). Unfortunately the price of either of these is probably way too high for an individual to afford.
Else there is this thing (based on a chinese-designed MIPS3 CPU running at 660 MHz, DDR SO-DIMM, no PCI but standard VIA PC southbridge). No idea on how to get this outside of China. |
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ddc
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Joined: 29 Aug 2006
Posts: 522
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| Posted: Thu Dec 27, 2007 4:55 pm Post subject: |
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| widan wrote: | | No idea on how to get this outside of China. |
in case, i will run a local pick up : P
(seriously i don't know, too) |
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Gentoo on Alternative Architectures
