[fpc-devel] progress of freepascal for mips

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On Sat, 2 Jun 2012 07:04:24 -0700 (PDT)
Leonardo M. Ramé <martinrame at yahoo.com> wrote:

>  
> Hi, while this interesting discussion about fpc for Linux/MIPS is
> evolving, we've received an IBM Mips server from a customer (I don't know
> the model yet) to try to install an hypervisor. 

Sorry if this has already been answered but I have tons of mail and haven't
read them all yet.

I am near certain IBM doesn't make any MIPS hardware at all and never has
in their history. In the past they've made all sorts of odd things but at
the moment all they make is Intel and POWER servers, as far as servers go.
MIPS in IBM-speak is "millions of instructions per second" which is how
they describe mainframe performance since they don't publish clock speeds.

> We need to run at least Windows and Linux servers on it. Do you know if
> Xen/VMWare or similar hypervisors run on this architecture?.

AFAIK, as far as Windows, nothing but Windows CE (not XP, 7, Vista etc) runs
on MIPS and I don't think Windows CE will run on server hardware. And all of
the virtualization options available are Intel-only except for Oracle's
SPARC VM, so no, you don't have any virtualization options except for
perhaps QEMU, but so does everyone who has an Intel box, so there isn't
anything to offer via virtualization.

> If I can install an hypervisor, I could create one virtual machine to let
> the FPC team test the MIPS version on this machine, it can be online 24/7.

Virtualization is thin to none on anything but Intel hardware. But there is
QEMU and it provides support for various architectures including MIPS. If
you install Linux on your MIPS server (if it really is a MIPS server, which
I don't think it is, or if it is, it isn't IBM) you can use QEMU like Fuxin
Zhang wrote he was using, but then so can everyone else who has an Intel box
(everybody) so I don't think it's going to be very helpful.

And the guy working on fpc on MIPS, Fuxin, is working for a MIPS
manufacturer so I would guess he has all the hardware he needs ;-)