Ingenic, a Chinese SoC CPU vendor, worked with ImgTec to add MXU (their MIPS32 SIMD extension) to MPlayer in an open source fork. However, they seem to insist that you reverse engineer their quirky instruction encodings from a confusing awk script. The only alternative is to actually run all of your source files through the awk script during builds...
I started adding them to the LLVM but lost interest. The instructions are available on the Creator CI20 and the GCW Zero, as well as some new Chinese market tablets from Philips.
I'm the student that contacted Miod and the one hosting these emails.
No one has questioned this, but I got Miod's permission before sharing.
I think his stance is reasonable. About a year ago, he converted the mips port to mips64 (lower case to denote the actual port names), removing MIPS32 support. If there were reasonably strong developer backing for a mips32 port, I bet it would happen. Obviously, a single curious undergrad doesn't qualify. Here's a great set of slides about this:
In regards to the Chromebook comment: there are MIPS Chromebooks in the pipeline. I remember digging through the relevant Linux commits looking for indicators of whether they'd be 32-bit or 64-bit, but I don't remember what I found.
See this email and the associated thread for more information:
I started adding them to the LLVM but lost interest. The instructions are available on the Creator CI20 and the GCW Zero, as well as some new Chinese market tablets from Philips.