Hi, I am quite a new MP-900C owner. Digging in the HPCfactor forums I found this sweet project.
Anyway, I've got a question: The ARM port of Debian has already had quite a long history. Recently (a few months ago) I've heard of a new ARMEL branch which is an improvement on ARM with a great boost in performance. Also I know from my friends that the Sharp Zaurus, which also carries an ARM xscale processor, has successfully run *fully complete and updated* Debian... so envy of those players .... But with the same line of processor, i guess the same should apply to M900C.

So, do you devs think it is REALLY possible and doable to make an ARMEL port instead of the old ARM? I have a little experience in (cross-)compiling kernels, so it would be great if I can get my hands dirty here...

For the mp900c it wouldnt require much effort to make it use EABI (which from my understanding Debian ARMEL is supporting).
Filip has had some success adding EABI support to the jornada7xx machines.

Your best bet is to try and make a test userland using oe, howto is available on frontpage wiki. If you need anymore information either write here or join up on #jlime on freenode..

I just managed to build an armel 3.2.1 kernel using qemu. It boots on my 710 but currently breaks because of the CF ID strings...

Did you get a userland going for it also?

I managed to build an openembedded userland for arm-gnueabi, then used the cross-compiler it build to compile a 2.6.24 kernel. This actually worked! Managed to get X and gcc working on the jornada, the only problem was that you have to remember to use "-march=armv4" everytime you run gcc...

EDIT: These j720 binaries (arm-gnueabi -march=armv4) could probably run on the 900c as well. But they would be slower on the NEC than if they had been compiled with "proper" EABI. (i.e. without -march=armv4).

Ill let you know once I get 3.3 going. Btw if you can subscribe to the mailinglist since I usually send updates there.

I look forward to it, and I did

cheers.