Hi folks, I keep having this fantasy that I will one day make my old Cobalt RaQ run a Debian system including 64-bit apps. I've got a copy of _See MIPS Run_ (wonderful book) and a working system based on Cobalt's hacked-up kernel 2.0.34 and Red Hat 5.x. I am comfortable using cross-gcc and messing with glibc. It seems that I have all the information required to do it all myself, but perhaps I might save a few years of work (or rid myself of this delusion) by consulting with you all first. The CPU is a QED RM5231 (CONFIG_NEVADA) 150MHz. May I assume that nobody has run a 64-bit kernel on this thing? The RaQ has no video card but a serial console, PCI, IDE, Ethernet, and special LEDs, panel buttons, and LCD display. If I can get a 64-bit kernel to boot and prove its existence through any of these devices, I will be drunk with power. The reason I want 64 bits is that I (a) want a challenge, (b) plan to write an application that uses a sparse address space (40 bits is better than 31), (c) plan to outlive the 31-bit time_t, and (d) am p.o.ed at having bought the thing based on misleading advertising that mentioned a 64-bit processor but not the 32-bit OS. Big/little endian macht nichts. I guess big will be easier, and I'm not concerned with running any existing 32-bit binaries. I imagine that I would start by grafting Cobalt's peripheral support code from arch/mips/cobalt (now defunct) and include/asm-mips/cobalt.h into the mips64 tree from cvs@oss.sgi.com:/cvs/linux. I will appreciate your advice. -John -- John Tobey, late nite hacker <jtobey@john-edwin-tobey.org> \\\ /// ]]] With enough bugs, all eyes are shallow. [[[ /// \\\
