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In that context I was interested to see this one pop into my inbox, and it seems a good example to highlight the benign self-interest that underpins a lot of open source work.
Imagination Technologies has announced it’s working with the Debian Project to help the development of the Debian operating system for the 64-bit MIPS architecture.
Imagination says it is donating several high-performance Rhino Labs SDNA-7130 appliances to the Debian Project for port development and maintenance.
Rhino Labs specialises in high-performance data security, networking, and data infrastructure systems.
“The new devices from Rhino Labs represent an important part of Imagination’s commitment to offer Debian developers free access to a wide range of 32- and 64-bit MIPS-based platforms,” said Ian Oliver, VP of developer tools at Imagination.
“We encourage the community to take advantage of the new hardware available and join us in the quest to provide the latest features of the 32- and 64-bit MIPS architecture to the widest possible range of Debian users.”
A developer website hosts the latest GNU/Linux kernel releases for MIPS CPUs, and the site also provides links to development systems available from Imagination for developers who want to contribute to Imagination’s Debian work.
The examples quoted by Imagination is the Creator Ci20 microcomputer, which features a dual-core MIPS32 processor clocked at 1.2 GHz and the Creator Ci40 IoT hub, which includes a 550MHz dual-core, dual-threaded MIPS32 interAptiv CPU. Both the platforms support Debian 8 as well as other GNU/Linux distributions such as OpenWrt and Buildroot.
You can read the full press release about the MIPS-Debian tie-up online.
Good for Imagination, and good luck to the Debian team.
