MIPS Shows Off Their New Linux Kernel Port To nanoMIPS

Earlier this week MIPS Technologies announced their new MIPS I7200 processor core built on the new nanoMIPS ISA. A day after they unveiled their new GCC port to this much-changed nanoMIPS instruction set and now today they sent out their initial Linux kernel patch for bringing up this new MIPS version that is coming with a new/updated kernel ABI.

Given the binary incompatibility to existing MIPS architecture generations, developers at MIPS Technologies took this time to also improve the compiler ABI, modernize the Linux user ABI for nanoMIPS, make more use of generic kernel interfaces, etc.

They have announced their Linux kernel nanoMIPS work on the mailing list.

For now they have the code based against a Linux 4.15 kernel branch. They are still working on preparing their code that would be cleaned up and apply against master for future inclusion into the mainline Linux kernel. This is a lot of work with nanoMIPS so we'll see if they have something ready for mainline by Linux 4.18 or if it will take much longer to get this new architecture support into place but anyhow it's great they are being quite punctual with their open-source/Linux bring-up of this modern MIPS ISA.