Ports LoongArch

astyle · 2025-04-15T06:17:27+0100

adrianceleste said:
Oh wow, this thread has had some activity. Well, to update things, I'm now using a µATX board that has a loongson processor in it, it is currently running debian unstable. It has 1TB of storage and 64GB of RAM, so a little of leg room to run VMs . In any case, if anyone was interested on time on a VM on this machine to do porting tasks, I would be willing to provide that. I realize this isn't the same as bare metal, but I imagine VMs might be an easier bringup target?

Maybe spin up a VM that emulates LoongArch, and distribute that over bittorrent?

Aminavy · 2025-04-15T10:24:26+0100

astyle said:
Maybe spin up a VM that emulates LoongArch, and distribute that over bittorrent?

Not cpu emulator. @adriancelete have real hardware, so I think running hypervisor is possible.

blackbird9 · 2025-04-15T17:46:05+0100

Loongson - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

"In March 2023, the United States Department of Commerce added Loongson to the Bureau of Industry and Security's Entity List for acquisition of American technology to support the People's Liberation Army (PLA)"

RetroComputingCollector · 2025-04-15T17:57:28+0100

Yep, why not just stick with MIPS and not a conpany that has links with the CCP!

Paul Floyd · 2025-04-16T08:50:30+0100

RetroComputingCollector said:
Yep, why not just stick with MIPS and not a conpany that has links with the CCP!

Who else is manufacturing MIPS CPUs these days?

covacat · 2025-04-16T10:12:16+0100

doesn't matter
mips is owned by imagination which in turn
Imagination Technologies Group Limited is a British semiconductor and software design company owned by Canyon Bridge Capital Partners, a private equity fund based in Beijing that is ultimately owned by the Chinese government.

RetroComputingCollector · 2025-04-16T10:35:27+0100

covacat said:
doesn't matter
mips is owned by imagination which in turn
Imagination Technologies Group Limited is a British semiconductor and software design company owned by Canyon Bridge Capital Partners, a private equity fund based in Beijing that is ultimately owned by the Chinese government.

Wow! I read more about it and apparently a whistleblower claimed that an investor connected to the Chinese government is attempting to appoint suspicious possible CCP-affiliated individuals to the board! Scary.

covacat · 2025-04-16T10:43:16+0100

I don't have a problem with this. I already have rockchip/allwinner (chinese) boards.

RetroComputingCollector · 2025-04-16T10:46:40+0100

covacat said:
I don't have a problem with this. I already have rockchip/allwinner (chinese) boards.

I know. It's fine. I would just be suspicious if the new mips boards were spying, which they are not (to my knowledge). The real concern is why FreeBSD doesn't have a port to VAX yet

.

RetroComputingCollector · 2025-04-16T10:48:27+0100

covacat said:
I don't have a problem with this. I already have rockchip/allwinner (chinese) boards.

And our phones and PCs are made in China, so why bother obsessing over MIPS, which no one has used in a loong (pun intended) time.