Since joining the Imagination family in 2012 the ecosystem around MIPS has been steadily growing. Now developers and hobbyists have more choice of operating systems, with the release of the popular Fedora Linux distribution for MIPS.
Fedora is used in three major areas – servers, workstations and cloud. Though Fedora itself is a community-driven project, it also serves as a foundation for Red Hat Enterprise Linux – a full enterprise-grade operating system. Fedora is available for a variety of CPU architectures and Imagination Technologies has joined the recent effort to ensure it runs on MIPS.
As a result, a remix of Fedora 24 running on MIPS-based systems has just become available. Users can run it on the Creator Ci20 board or in QEMU (32-bit and 64-bit).
There have been several changes since the last release. The major update is that all the packages are now built using Koji – the Fedora build system. At this moment the build system is internal to Imagination but it is expected to be merged into Fedora in the future.
All the packages have also been GPG-signed for the first time and repositories have been generated using mash – the tool Fedora uses for generating repositories.
The system is not a complete Fedora distribution; several packages still need to be patched to work properly on the MIPS architecture. Our developers are working with the community to get these patches merged and we’re continuing to see significant improvements.
If you are interested in Fedora MIPS, have questions, or would like to join the effort, you can follow the Fedora MIPS mailing list or join the #fedora-mips IRC channel on Freenode.
MIPS support in Fedora is getting better with every release so look out for a fully-featured Fedora in the near future.
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