Re: Crazy cross-MIPS-boards stunts possible?

[Jason Thorpe <thorpej%sonic.net@localhost>]

> On Dec 1, 2020, at 4:31 PM, Swift Griggs <swiftgriggs%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:
> 
> 
> I'm curious about a few wild "for fun" ideas:
> 
> - I remember binary emulation working on several exotic platforms and
>  their commercial incarnations. Would it be impossible to run IRIX
>  binaries in NetBSD with something similar?

We used to have COMPAT_IRIX, but it was removed 9 years ago.

> - What about binaries between MIPS and SGIMIPS ports? Is that impossible?

sgimips is big-endian, so "mipseb".  There are a couple of ABIs supported ... "o32" (traditional 32-bit) and "n32" (32-bit ABI for 64-bit processors).  With a few exceptions (for very system-specific programs), mipseb-o32 binaries built for sgimips will run just fine on e.g. evbmips (like MIPS Malta) running in big-endian mode.

> - In qemu, do any of these work for running netbsd? I looked here first:
>  https://www.netbsd.org/ports/emulators.html answer is "no" ?
> 
> What's on my system in the way of Qemu + MIPS:
> qemu-system-mips      qemu-system-mips64el
> qemu-system-mips64    qemu-system-mipsel

The Malta configuration should work with NetBSD, although I had some problems last time I tried it.

GXemul had a good DECstation emulation, and I recently added tap networking support to it (in the pkgsrc version), so you could give that a whirl.

> 
> - Is there any way to cross compile for IRIX in NetBSD ? (Sorry, maybe
>  should ask in SGIMIPS, but thought some MIPS guy might know).
> 
> Is the little EdgeRouter the closest we're gonna get at the moment to a cheap single-board MIPS "RPI"-style board or is there something better right now supported in NetBSD?

Probably?

-- thorpej