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Debian adds LoongArch as officially supported architecture
- renewiltord 10mo agoWow 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.
- cbmuser 10mo agoYou can buy LoongArch hardware on AliExpress, for example.
- renewiltord 10mo agoAlways thought they’d ship me garbage. Not sure why. I’ve bought lots of stuff there. But I don’t know how to tell it’s not some rebadged Via chip before it arrives. Just the game, I suppose. To Aliexpress!
- suprjami 10mo agoBuy from listings with many sales and good reviews. Look for reviews with real images and real seeming phrases in many languages, not 10 accounts all posting the same phrase with no pictures. Buy from stores with a name, preferably who have established a "brand" for themselves across many products. UGreen are a great example of this for USB gadgets. Don't buy from stores named Shop195772040, these will take your money and disappear or ship fakes. Don't buy suspiciously cheap items with no sales, these will do the same.
- officeplant 10mo agoExperiences can vary from seller to seller, but I've owned a few oddball motherboards from china that shouldn't exist. (old server cpu sockets shoved onto a Micro ATX Board) Any time I've had issues getting a refund took maybe a week or two at most. Although the last issue I had was a few VRM components exploding and throwing shrapnel all over inside the case. So buy at your own risk on some things.
- DeathArrow 10mo agoI don't think LoongArch is the same thing with MIPS according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson
- pantalaimon 10mo agoMIPS ist dead, so not much gain in keeping compatibility with it anymore.
- cbmuser 9mo ago> I don't think LoongArch is the same thing with MIPS according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson Where did I make that claim? I never said that.
- csmantle 10mo agoThere seems to be a community-run site about this: https://loongfans.cn/en/pages/intro.html#i-m-sold-where-can-i-buy-one https://loongfans.cn/en/pages/intro.html#i-m-sold-where-can-...
- Kwpolska 10mo agoThis site links to https://areweloongyet.com/en/ https://areweloongyet.com/en/ > Even though the Loongson Corporation has yet to release the remaining volumes of the LoongArch manual, thanks to a wealth of public information such as publicly available QEMU and Linux changes, "undisclosed" information such as instruction encoding and behaviors is, in effect, already public. The absence of manuals can no longer hinder optimization efforts by The People. If the architecture is still undocumented, I would not consider Debian’s move to be wise.
- budududuroiu 10mo agoI want one of these chips
- pantalaimon 10mo agohttps://aliexpress.com/item/1005009389019899.html https://aliexpress.com/item/1005009389019899.html
- basemi 10mo agoFor the curious: https://loongson.github.io/LoongArch-Documentation/LoongArch-Vol1-EN.html https://loongson.github.io/LoongArch-Documentation/LoongArch... https://docs.kernel.org/arch/loongarch/introduction.html https://docs.kernel.org/arch/loongarch/introduction.html
- EricRiese 10mo ago> 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. -Wikipedia Right on time
- em500 10mo agoI thought they pivoted to RISC-V https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V#Strategic_background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V#Strategic_background
- pantalaimon 10mo agoNah it's much easier to move fast if you don't rely on a committee.
- Neywiny 10mo agoI think it depends on your skillset and goals. If you want to run other peoples' software and compilers and whatnot, it doesn't hurt to implement to an existing spec. If you're going to write your own or need a lot of mods, may as well roll your own architecture.
- pantalaimon 10mo agoIf you have the manpower to push support for the foundations upstream, the rest falls into place. Open Source code can just be recompiled, there is a lot less arch specific hackery going on these days (and if there is for ASM optimized hot paths, it's only compiled for that arch).
- messe 10mo agoLoongson (the company) have been around since 2001. Loongarch (the ISA that debian is now supporting) has only been around since 2021. Previously Loongson used MIPS and another ISA known as LoongISA.
- wkat4242 10mo agoHasn't RISC-V kinda taken its place by now?
- DeathArrow 10mo agoAre there RISC-V chips with comparable performance for desktops and laptops on the market?
- wkat4242 10mo agoI thought so, yes: https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/05/china_alibaba_risc_v_c930/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/05/china_alibaba_risc_v_... Not sure how they compare exactly. And of course it never hurts to have two players in the game. I just meant I've heard a lot more about stuff going on in the RISC-V field in China. A lot of it is focused on the embedded stuff yes but not only there.
- fweimer 10mo agoAre C930 CPUs actually available? For the Loongson 3A6000, there is an independent performance review: https://chipsandcheese.com/p/loongson-3a6000-a-star-among-chinese-cpus https://chipsandcheese.com/p/loongson-3a6000-a-star-among-ch... I couldn't find something comparable for C930 CPUs.
- cbmuser 9mo agoDebian's RISC-V machines are rather slow. It takes several days to build the gcc-15 package in riscv64 but just a few hours on loong64.
- snvzz 9mo agoYup. Their best builders run JH7110 (based on the in-order SiFive U74 cpu, RVA20 + partial B) and these are slow, somewhere between rpi3 and rpi4. This will improve in 2026, with the first chips integrating RVA23 microarchitectures, such as the Tenstorrent Atlantis SoC and development board, with Ascalon, announced for 2026Q2.
- yegle 10mo agoThat'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).
- kqr2 10mo agoDidn't Richard Stallman use a Lemote Loongson computer before? https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
- rixed 10mo agoYes, and that machine was exceptionally good; by far the best laptop i ever owned: mate screen, good keyboard, small and lightweight for the time, and exceptionally open and well supported for Linux despite being a mips arch. I would gladly get myself another one if I could.
- nateb2022 10mo agoThat had a MIPS CPU
- yanhangyhy 10mo agocomes 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
- DeathArrow 10mo agoI think the process is very far behind the 3nm used by Intel and ARM SOC makers, so performance per watt will take a hit.
- drumhead 10mo agoAre Loongson powered machines available in the west? Are they only available from Chinese manufacturers?
- pantalaimon 10mo agoYou can just buy them off AliExpress, I've got myself a 3A6000 board from there - it's an interesting machine, feels much like a (UEFI) PC and is sure faster than any readily available ARM SBC, about the level of Zen1 I'd say.
- jambutters 10mo agoInteresting, I thought performance was lower than zen 1. I wonder if they'll ever catch up
- INTPenis 10mo agoI 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?
- pantalaimon 10mo agoActually Alpine had support for LoongArch64 well before Debian - I have it running on my machine. Works fine expect for support for the integrated GPU. https://www.alpinelinux.org/posts/Alpine-3.21.0-released.html https://www.alpinelinux.org/posts/Alpine-3.21.0-released.htm...
- cbmuser 9mo ago> Actually Alpine had support for LoongArch64 well before Debian. Nah, we added the loong64 in Debian already in 2023: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2023/08/msg00000.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2023/08/msg00... It was just promoted to being a release architecture.
- infinet 10mo agoOnce 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".
- AceJohnny2 10mo agoHuh. Is this arch supported by LLVM/Rust? It was announced recently (https://lwn.net/Articles/1044496/ 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/loongarch-linux.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/beta/rustc/platform-support/loonga... In fact, Rust's targets page is much bigger than I remembered! Good work
- cbmuser 9mo ago> Huh. Is this arch supported by LLVM/Rust? Yes. > It was announced recently (https://lwn.net/Articles/1044496/ 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.