MIPS N32/N64 ABI Port

by Eleanor Chen for Debian Project

MIPS is one of the most elegant RISC CPUs in the industry, and there are quite a lot different usages in its family. This project attempts to create a new MIPS N32/N64 ABI port for Debian. Different from O32 (used by existing mips/mipsel port), N32 is an address model that has most 64-bit capabilities but uses 32-bit data structures to save space and process time, it is quite similar to the ongoing x32 port for x86 platform. At the same time, N64 is a full 64-bit address model which is comparable to x86_64 on x86. There is consensus that N32/N64 ABI would give capable devices better performance, while O32 ABI should be kept for devices that is only 32-bit capable. Since Multiarch support is almost available in Debian, we are able to apply the state-of-art technology to help us on both bootstrapping and future usages. Users can run N64 kernel with mixed N32/N64 userland to take advantage of both the performance and the large memory as needed.