The vmips Project

Old vmips news

When you have finished contemplating history, you may choose to go back to the new news.

27/Nov/2004

The online version of the VMIPS documentation has been updated to match what was released with VMIPS 1.3. Also, the build status page, which contained only really ancient build information, is history.

20/Oct/2004

There's now a binary package for Debian stable available for VMIPS 1.3. Enjoy!

8/Oct/2004

VMIPS 1.3 was released, marking the start of a new stable vmips-1_3-branch in CVS. This new release focuses mainly on improvements to existing features (especially interrupts and interrupt-driven I/O); it has also undergone significant code cleanup.

You can check out the full release notes or go download it. There are also RPM packages for i386 available, built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 3 ("Taroon Update 2"), thanks to the wonderful bounty of SourceForge's Compile Farm.

23/Aug/2004

VMIPS 1.2.2 was released. This minor bug-fix release an important bug fix to the debugger interface, as well as a few other, more minor bug fixes to the Makefiles, configure scripts, and command-line parsing code.

I also made available RPMs which I built on my Debian i386 machine - so, take them with a grain of salt! (I don't have a machine running Red Hat anymore.)

You can check out the release notes or download the new release.

26/Jul/2004

VMIPS 1.2.1 was released. It contains a few important bug fixes to the system control coprocessor (CP0), involving interrupt processing and TLB miss exception handling, as well as a few other, more minor bug fixes. Read the release notes or go download.

26/Jun/2004

VMIPS 1.2 was released. VMIPS 1.2 is much easier to configure and build than previous VMIPS releases. It also includes a new tracing framework, a debugger interrupt key, beta support for some DECstation-compatible devices, and some bug fixes. Read the release notes or go download.

23/Jun/2004

The new stable vmips-1_2-branch is now available in CVS! Details are here.

10/Jun/2004

A new status report is available.

31/Mar/2004

A new status report is available.

23/Jan/2004

I updated the Linux-hosted MIPS cross compiler tools to the ones that I normally use. I also fixed the broken Bugs link on the nav-bar.

20/Jan/2004

New development snapshots were posted.

7/Jan/2004

Paul Twohey has graciously contributed fresh, tasty Mac OS X 10.3-hosted MIPS cross compiler tools, which you can download from the Mac OS X MIPS Tools page of the VMIPS website.

4/Jan/2004

Some of you may not know that the primary Web hosting for the VMIPS project is provided by the JohnCompanies virtual private server/collocation firm. They provide a substantial discount for free-software/open-source projects. We invite you to check out their web site for more information.

30/Nov/2003

A new development snapshot is available. It is briefly described here.

24/Oct/2003

VMIPS 1.1.3 was released. This release has several bug fixes in the TLB emulation. There is also a new development snapshot, which is briefly described here.

20/Aug/2003

VMIPS 1.1.2 was released. This release has several bug fixes related to interrupt handling.

16/Jun/2003

VMIPS 1.1.1 was released. (Sorry for the delay in getting this posted.)

1/May/2003

New snapshot posted. Public releases page looks better now, too.

12/Apr/2003

I've made another snapshot vmips-20030412 (source only) from the CVS HEAD. This one has an important bug fix in the CP0 PRId register, and a couple of nice code cleanups, as well as a bunch of improvements in the booter. There's some experimental code in this one which is not currently in the CVS, which allows VMIPS to interrupt the debugger when you hit ^C. I haven't checked it in because I'm not happy with the design, but I thought I'd get it out there so that people could play with it.

The booter now incorporates some minimal DECstation 5000 compatibility: the jump table that the DECstation PROM exports is now in boot_setup.S, and some of the easier routines to implement have been filled in.

14/Mar/2003

VMIPS 1.1 was released.

14/Dec/2002

We've made the CVS branch for vmips 1.1; a release should be coming up soon.

28/Oct/2002

For those of you who miss having snapshots, I have generated a new one (but not RPMs.) You'll find it on the snapshots page. Currently I'm not able to generate snapshots automatically, but hopefully I can put up new ones from time to time by hand.

20/Oct/2002

Just so you know, vmips is still getting lots of work ... just not much which is very newsworthy. You can read a terse summary of what has been done in the past few months here.

28/Jun/2002

Testsuite automated runs are here. Every time there is a new snapshot, the testsuite should be run, and the results will appear in the testresults directory. I will try to come up with a better interface for this, but for now you just get to see the .log and .sum files.

I removed a bunch of deadwood from the CVS tree. The vmips directory should be somewhat more manageable now. Snapshots are 3 to 6 KBytes lighter (compressed).

14/Jun/2002

The testsuite is working again, and all regressions have been fixed on mainline.

7/Jun/2002

After about a 10-week hiatus, snapshots are building as tar.gz and RPM format again. The snap RPMs are now built with gcc 2.95.3.

28/Apr/2002

VMIPS 1.0.4 has been released. This release includes bug fixes in the TLB, in the interrupt handling mechanisms, and the SPIM-compatible console device. As a side effect, there is also a slight speed-up when interrupts are turned off.

Paul Twohey's clock device patch has been integrated into the mainline CVS. The testsuite is currently broken, but once I get the Makefiles rewritten it should be working better than ever.

12/Jan/2002

You can now enter VMIPS bugs into the SourceForge bug tracking system.

Also, VMIPS 1.0.3 has been released. (Ok, we lied.) This is another bug fix release, fixing important bugs in several instructions. Check out the release notes or go download.

6/Jan/2002

We've switched to using ViewCVS. You are welcome to look at the to-do list for the next release.

4/Jan/2002

The testsuite development work is making great strides. We expect that it will be ready for widespread abuse any day now.

17/Dec/2001

VMIPS 1.0.2 has been released. This is another bug fix release, improving compatibility with both Mac OS X and gcc 3.0. Check out the release notes or go download. This may be the last bug fix release for a while, so that we can concentrate on working on 1.1.x.

Also, there's now a screenshot available!

27/Nov/2001

VMIPS 1.0.1 has been released. Check out the release notes or go download.

28/Oct/2001

VMIPS 1.0 has been released! Check out the release notes or go download.

14/Aug/2001

There is a build status page. If you get vmips built, mail in the results of running buildstat.sh to vmips at www.dgate.org.

18/Jul/2001

MIPS tools for Mac OS X, contributed by Paul Twohey, are now available along with the older Linux MIPS tools distribution. Click here to download them.

13/May/2001

The documentation is looking much better lately. In addition, the to-do list now contains a list of 1.0 release "blocker" bugs.

9/May/2001

The vmips 0.9 release, suitable for hacking but lacking in documentation and installation, has been posted.

11/Apr/2001

Preliminary version of documentation posted.

7/Apr/2001

The vmips home page is now mirrored on SourceForge, however, their web server has some configuration issues, so you are always welcome to access the vmips home page directly. The ftp site is now a mirror of the home page as well, so you can also access the web pages by browsing the ftp site.

29/Jan/2001

ROM breakpoints have been declared working.

Building vmips on Solaris should work again.

I made a really barebones cross compiler package, which you can read about here. Hopefully this will make it possible for more people to play with vmips on their own boxes without having to build their own cross compilers.

14/Dec/2000

The building of binary snapshots works again, and the faulty binary snapshots have been deleted from the vmips ftp server.

Work has begun on support for breakpoints in ROM, accompanied by a general cleanup of the debugger support.

13/Nov/2000

On the good side, the current cvs version of the xmboot ROM program (in the vmips/misc_code/xmboot directory) has successfully booted a "Hello, world" little-endian MIPS ECOFF binary.

If you want to do this, you'll need an XMODEM transfer program (such as lrzsz), and a terminal program which can talk on a pseudo-terminal (such as minicom 1.83.1 with my pty patch.) Then you can compile vmips, compile the stuff in the vmips/misc_code/xmboot directory, boot vmips with boot.rom, connect to it with minicom -o -p, use the "rz" command to send it the "loadtest" image, run "info" to see that it transferred correctly, and run "boot" to boot it.

On the bad side, the building of the binary snapshots is currently broken. Use the source rpm or source tar.gz snapshots instead, for now.

26/Sep/2000

The gdb remote interface has evolved to the point where you can actually connect to vmips from a mips-targeted gdb and single-step through a program. Not much else works yet, but it is kind of cool nonetheless.

The vmips mailing list has been created; join it if you want to talk about vmips and hear any interesting announcements I send out.

I have added a bit of information to the vmips/doc directory in the CVS repository on how to create a NetBSD mips-targeted cross compiler from a Linux machine. This information comes in the form of an as yet untested shell script and a set of patches against NetBSD-1.4.2. I haven't yet achieved similar success with a Linux/mips target; I'm open to advice here.

20/Aug/2000

The serial interface and memory-mapped device interface are done. Current effort is centered on developing a debugging interface, based on the gdb remote serial protocol.

The website has been slightly restructured. Click on the navigation bar at the top to jump to its various sections.