MIPS fun, Broadcom quad-core 1480 board

As I mentioned on debian-project recently, Broadcom has been very supportive of our MIPS port. They donated several fast MIPS development boards (dual-core 800 MHz) to a number of Debian developers as well as machines for our mips and mipsel buildd network. Without those boards, we'd have a hell of a time keeping up and certainly wouldn't meet the Vancouver requirements. Broadcom recently released a new chip, the 1480, which is a quad-core CPU, and I managed to get hold of a development board based on this chip. I had some trouble with FedEx because they weren't sure how to handle a shipment worth several grant to an individual who is a volunteer working on a project which legally doesn't exist in the UK. However, the FedEx lady was really nice and said she'd sort it out... and the next day the board turned up.

Unfortunately, SMP support in the MIPS kernel was broken so I was only able to run the board in non-SMP mode: it really sucks having a quad-core CPU and then you can only use one core! There were also DMA errors when using an IDE PCI card. Fortunately, the SMP problems got solved in the meantime, and using the generic IDE driver works. Now that I have the board running, I compiled GCC 4.1 and my next step will be to build the Debian archive to see how well GCC 4.1 works on MIPS.