[Soc-coordination] [GSoC 2014] Improve Debian port on mips/mipsel: Final report

[Plamen Aleksandrov]

This is my final report on the project "Improve Debian port on mips/mipsel".


The project consisted of fixing broken builds for the MIPS/MIPSel architectures.
I used three MIPS virtual machines on which I built the packages I worked on.

Most of the problems I encountered were incompatibilities between package/library versions. There were a lot of packages that failed to build under some system-specific conditions. Some packages were not adapted to use MIPS-specific instructions. For other packages the build was too slow and did not manage to finish before the process was killed.
There were also packages which were not written in a way in which they can build on MIPS. This includes packages containing architecture-specific code and no corresponding code for MIPS, packages that don't take MIPS-specific behavior into account and packages that don't work on big endian machines.

The most interesting thing I encountered was the package liblinux-prctl-perl. It failed to compile due to a failing security test. It turned out it was a Linux kernel bug in some versions of the kernel. Here is the whole discussion on the issue:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=751417
The latest version of the kernel was not susceptible to this bug and thanks to the Debian developers, a patch was created for some older kernels.

I have provided patches for all the packages I fixed through the bug tracking system.
It was an interesting project which turned out harder than expected. The biggest challenge was the slowness of the build process.

I am happy to have the opportunity to help Debian.


Plamen Alexandrov
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