Wow man. Back in the day the Godson processors were supposed to be these MIPS chips from China that ran Linux. I wanted one just for the sheer curiosity of it all but couldn’t get one here in the US.
I wonder if there is a way to get them from Taiwan / Korea. I can’t go to mainland China.
> The development of the first Loongson chip was started in 2001. The aim of the Godson project was to develop "high performance general-purpose microprocessors in China", and to become technologically self-sufficient as part of the Made in China 2025 plan.
Well, that's what you get when you can do nation-state planning with an event horizon measured in decades, practically infinite cash and with the ruthlessness to engage in corporate espionage plus the total elimination of political campaigning (because you're the CCP, the only gang in town).
In contrast, Western corporate execs have an event horizon between "next quarterly reports" and "vesting/bonus period", additionally in any sufficiently large organizations you will have fiefdom fights that are counterproductive to the company at large, and Western politicians can only think to "next important election", so basically a few months as well because there is always an election going on in some state or local division.
We have gotten societally incompatible with not just coming up with new ideas, but with maintaining what we already have. It's like in 1984 - we can't even think of such timeframes any more.
And no, I'm not calling for a dictatorship. I'm rather calling for dissolution of the stock market for speculation, and for consolidating elections to once every four years so that politicians have time to cool down from the constant campaign hype pressure.
That's a long way and congrats to the Longson team!
My college friend participated in the Google Summer of Code 2009, migrating openSUSE to MIPS. The CPU they used was an earlier version of Longson (forgot which one).
comes a long way.. they have some pc models sell in china but i guess only IT dev people would give it a try. china is pushing the state-owned companies and civil servant to use linux (some linux distro build by china company and replace windows and all America product) and the china-build CPU, but LooongArch also seems is not the #1 choice. I hope they can chooose LoongArch and built some debian based OS to use. This would be a 100 millon user market..
Also seems russia is interested to do some stuff based on LoongArch
just found one on JD: 14inch, LoongArch 3A6000, 16G mem, 512G storage, 4G GPU storage, sold for 6499RMB around 920USD
I briefly owned one of the first Loongson netbook laptops, the Lemote I believe it was nicknamed. I've always been very much into open hardware, so I picked one up as soon as I could.
And I believe Debian was the only distro I was able to run on it back then too. Also NetBSD.
I ended up giving it to someone at the local hacker space. It's fun to try but it's not a daily driver.
Didn't Stallman use one as daily driver for a while?
Once I used an old MIPS debian in qemu to test big endian. I thought since LoongArch has its root in MIPS it may be big endian. It turns out "LoongArch bit designations are always little-endian".
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 63.3 ms ] threadI wonder if there is a way to get them from Taiwan / Korea. I can’t go to mainland China.
https://loongfans.cn/en/pages/intro.html#i-m-sold-where-can-...
https://loongson.github.io/LoongArch-Documentation/LoongArch...
https://docs.kernel.org/arch/loongarch/introduction.html
-Wikipedia
Right on time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V#Strategic_background
Loongarch (the ISA that debian is now supporting) has only been around since 2021. Previously Loongson used MIPS and another ISA known as LoongISA.
In contrast, Western corporate execs have an event horizon between "next quarterly reports" and "vesting/bonus period", additionally in any sufficiently large organizations you will have fiefdom fights that are counterproductive to the company at large, and Western politicians can only think to "next important election", so basically a few months as well because there is always an election going on in some state or local division.
We have gotten societally incompatible with not just coming up with new ideas, but with maintaining what we already have. It's like in 1984 - we can't even think of such timeframes any more.
And no, I'm not calling for a dictatorship. I'm rather calling for dissolution of the stock market for speculation, and for consolidating elections to once every four years so that politicians have time to cool down from the constant campaign hype pressure.
this would do so much untold good, i hope i live to see it
It takes several days to build the gcc-15 package in riscv64 but just a few hours on loong64.
My college friend participated in the Google Summer of Code 2009, migrating openSUSE to MIPS. The CPU they used was an earlier version of Longson (forgot which one).
https://hackweek.opensuse.org/projects/bootstrap-opensuse-on...
https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
Also seems russia is interested to do some stuff based on LoongArch
just found one on JD: 14inch, LoongArch 3A6000, 16G mem, 512G storage, 4G GPU storage, sold for 6499RMB around 920USD
And I believe Debian was the only distro I was able to run on it back then too. Also NetBSD.
I ended up giving it to someone at the local hacker space. It's fun to try but it's not a daily driver.
Didn't Stallman use one as daily driver for a while?
It was announced recently (https://lwn.net/Articles/1044496/) that Apt, the Debian package manager, would require Rust by May 2026.
It does look like LoongArch is a supported target of Rust at Tier 2: https://doc.rust-lang.org/beta/rustc/platform-support/loonga...
In fact, Rust's targets page is much bigger than I remembered! Good work
Yes.
> It was announced recently (https://lwn.net/Articles/1044496/) that Apt, the Debian package manager, would require Rust by May 2026.
No, that was just the wish expressed by one of the APT maintainers. No actual decision has been made yet.