FreeBSD/mips updated

The base/projects/mips branch has been merged into base/head. The merge is complete and the sanity tests have passed. The code has booted on both a Ubiquiti RouterStation (big endian) as well as in gxemul (little endian).

The branch lived for one year, minus a day, and accumulated much work:

• A new port to the Atheros AR71xx series of processors. This port supports the RouterStation and RouterStation PRO boards from Ubiquiti. Other boards should work with minimal tweaking. This port should be considered as nearing production quality, and has been used extensively by the developers. The primary author of this port is Oleksandr Tymoshenko (gonzo@freebsd.org).


• A new port to the sibyte BCM1250 SoC on the BCM91250 evaluation board (aka SWARM). This port is reported to be stable, but this hardware is a little old and not widely available. The primary author of this port is Neel Natu (neel@freebsd.org). Only one core is presently supported.


• A port, donated by Cavium, to their Octeon and Octeon plus series of SoC (CN3xxx and CN5xxx). This code is preliminary, supporting only a single core right now. It has been lightly tested on the CN3860 evaluation board only in 32-bit mode. Warner Losh (imp@freebsd.org) has been driving the efforts to get this code into the tree.


• A port, donated by RMI, to their XLR series of SoCs. This port is single core only as well. The code reaches multi-user but should be considered beta quality for the moment. Randal Stewart (rrs@freebsd.org) has been driving the efforts to integrate this into the tree.


• Preliminary support for building a mips64 kernel from this source base. More work is needed here, but at least two kernels successfully build in 64-bit mode (OCTEON1 and MALTA64).


• Very early support for N32 and N64 ABIs


• Support for booting compressed kernels has been added (gonzo@).


• Improved support for debugging


• Improved busdma and bus_space support


• Many bug fixes


• More types of MIPS cores are recognized


• Expanded cache handling for newer processors


• Beginning of a port to the alchemy au1XXX cpus is present but experimental.


• Work on SMP is underway to support multicore processors like the sibyte, Octeon and XLR processors.

I'm sure there are minor items I've forgotten. If so, please forgive any omission on my part...

The branch had been updated incorrectly several times over the past year, and the damage was too much to repair. We've retired the branch and will do further mips development in "head" for the time being. If you have a checked out tree, the suggested way to update the projects/mips tree you have is to do a "svn switch svn://svn.freebsd.org/base/head" in that tree.

I'd like to thank everybody that has contributed time, code or hardware to make FreeBSD/mips better.

We are still investigating how feasible merging all this work into stable/8 will be, as it represents a huge leap forward in code stability and quality.

As development proceeds, I'll keep posting updates. In addition, I hope to have some mini "how-to" wiki pages done for people that want to try it out.