Re: [MirageOS-devel] [ANN] RISC-V backend for the native-code OCaml compiler

[Justin Cormack <justin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 11 June 2015 at 15:37, Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 9 Jun 2015, at 04:04, Vincent Bernardoff <vb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> On 07/06/2015 19:45, Nicolas Ojeda Bar wrote:
>>> Forwarding in case it is of interest.
>>>
>>> Best wishes,
>>> Nicolas
>>
>> This is really cool, thanks!
>>
>> I was wondering, since you based your work on the old MIPS backend, how
>> much work would it be to have a working mips32 native for ocaml ? This
>> would enable Mirage to run on most openwrt hardware running on MIPS (it
>> is a _lot_ of really interesting hardware for IoT / mesh networking tasks).
>
> The MIPS backend was removed because of the sheer number of ABIs that
> had to be supported, so testing it became really hard.  It could be
> maintained out of tree without too much trouble, if hardware were
> available.  We did some work on a MIPS64 port backend for the MRC2
> project at the Computer Lab: https://github.com/ChrisDodd/ocaml/tree/mips
>
> OpenWRT is a pretty compelling case...

MIPS has actually got better recently, there are only two major ABIs
that are supported, which are the two supported for Android, which are
o32 on mips32r2, and n64. The Imagination CI20 is a reasonable dev
board for the o32 target, easily available, n64 is still harder to
get. n32 is not really important any more, most 64 bit targets run
with full 64 bit userspace. OpenWrt is unfortunately largely on
hardware without *any* floating point though, which makes it less
compelling.

Justin

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