Re: is mips supported?

[David Chisnall]

On 24 Jun 2009, at 12:01, Sante Caserio wrote:

> Does GNUStep support mips architecture? Is it possible to install  
> GNUStep on
> a Lemote Yeelong laptop? (http://www.lemote.com/english/yeeloong.html)

That should run GNUstep nicely.  There are some problems with GNUstep  
on stock Debian on some of the cheaper MIPS laptops.  Debian expects  
hardware floating point (which Loongson 2F in that machine has, but  
the cheaper MIPS chips don't) and so every floating point operation is  
trapped and emulated.  This is very slow for anything in GUI (all  
drawing operations use floating point extensively).  Recompiling to  
use soft-float makes things a lot faster, but this changes the calling  
convention of anything using floating point operations, so requires  
everything from libc up to be rebuild.

We added m68k atomic operations a few weeks ago, but we don't have any  
for MIPS currently (only x86, PowerPC and m68k).  If you are building  
with GCC 4.2 or later then it will use the compiler's support for  
atomic operations, which should work on MIPS.  If not, then every - 
retain or -release operation will acquire and release a mutex, which  
is (comparatively) very slow.  If you're familiar with MIPS assembly,  
feel free to contribute some inline asm as fall-back code.

Everything else should work correctly.  Enjoy your dog leftover...

David