Debian adds LoongArch as officially supported architecture

lists.debian.org

142 points by cbmuser 4 days ago


EricRiese - 3 days 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

kqr2 - 16 hours ago

Didn't Richard Stallman use a Lemote Loongson computer before?

https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

yanhangyhy - 15 hours ago

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

INTPenis - 8 hours ago

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?

basemi - 4 days ago

For the curious:

https://loongson.github.io/LoongArch-Documentation/LoongArch...

https://docs.kernel.org/arch/loongarch/introduction.html

AceJohnny2 - 7 hours ago

Huh. Is this arch supported by LLVM/Rust?

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

drumhead - 12 hours ago

Are Loongson powered machines available in the west? Are they only available from Chinese manufacturers?

yegle - 16 hours ago

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).

infinet - 7 hours ago

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".

wkat4242 - 16 hours ago

Hasn't RISC-V kinda taken its place by now?

renewiltord - 4 days ago

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.

budududuroiu - 4 days ago

I want one of these chips