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Experimental Port of Debian To OpenRISC

Posted by Unknown on from the building-rms-a-new-laptop dept.

Via Phoronix comes news that Debian has been ported to the OpenRISC architecture by Christian Svensson. Quoting his mailing list post: "Some people know that I've been working on porting Glibc and doing some toolchain work. My evil master plan was to make a Debian port, and today I'm a happy hacker indeed! ... If anyone want to try this on real hardware (would be very cool to see how this runs IRL), ping me on IRC [#openrisc on freenode] and I'll set you up with instructions how to use debootstrap - just point to a repo with the debs and you're all set, the wonders of binary distributions." For those who don't know, OpenRISC is the completely open source RISC processor intended as the crown jewel of the Opencores project. A working port of glibc and a GNU/Linux distribution is a huge step toward making use of OpenRISC practical. There's a screencast of the system in action, and source on Github (at posting time, it was a month out of date from the looks of it). Christian Svensson's Github account also has repos for the rest of the toolchain.

3 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. nice! by dmitrygr · · Score: 2, Insightful

    very very cool porting debian userspace to a new arch is a fun exercise

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    1. Enjoy your job
    2. Make lots of money
    3. Work within the law

    Choose any two.
  2. Re:OpenRISC hardware? by Rufty · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Well, these, but they look more OpenWRT than Debian.

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    Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
  3. Re:Open source chips by Darinbob · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Another good advantage of OpenRISC is that it is open for students to examine and use and experiment with. There are some other CPU designs that are available but they tend to be much smaller or not as full featured.