Loonies for Loongsons

leadedsolder.com

32 points·zdw··5 comments

Quick plug for this guy who built a LoongArch emulator for use as a... scripting engine?

There was a flurry of LoongArch at the time, some discussion on that post (43 points, 3 months ago, 12 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46375067

Debian adds LoongArch as officially supported architecture (162 points, 54 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46334333

Loongarch Improvements with Box64 (66 points, 6 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46514807

Box64 Expands into RISC-V and LoongArch territory (45 points, 7 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46751460

I worked with a kernel dev at an industrial embedded company who absolutely loved longsoon and insisted we add it to our platform stack - he did get some traction on the idea, I have to admit (the lab was keen on multi-architecture build budgets..) - but .. the machines just didn't show up. ARM ate everyones lunch.

I know he, personally, flew to China and returned with a Longsoon laptop, but .. we can't all fly to China.

Why did he prefer it to RISC-V? Just more mature or some architectural advantage?

I'm going to chalk it up to general techno-political ideology, but RISC-V was just as inaccessible in those days too.

Nowadays I'm happy to report that my soldering iron is running RISC-V, and that is as it should be.

However in certain realms - safety critical, 2-of-3 voting and so on - having a diversity of platforms is still considered productive, so .. if the foundries ever boot up properly .. there's still lots of life outside the mono-platform. I'm sure RISC-V is a build target for him these days.

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