Comment by tibbydudeza
2 years ago
It seems Linux is going to win the desktop wars in China.
Windows is clearly never going to be ported to this oddball MIPS architecture so their stack will all be dependence on open source but sadly they will not return the favor by releasing their source or maybe my perception of China open source is biased.
> not return the favor by releasing their source
That's not quite true and your bias is showing. The company behind Loongarch is reasonably friendly to FOSS and most of their LA64 changes (to Linux, llvm, binutils, gcc, etc) are upstreamed in a timely fashion. As for the chipset, kernel drivers are all open source although not all have been accepted upstream. I have personally been maintaining the out-of-tree Linux drm driver for their onboard gpu chip and it's available on github https://github.com/cl91/linux/tree/gsgpu-devel. If you have a barebone 3A6000+7A2000 setup, as far as I know the only closed source component needed is their userspace mesa driver for the onboard gpu.
+1 while I don't have any idea this deep in hardware engineering, in normal appdev Chinese open source contributions are well known and there's a whole class of up and coming apps which are great, just not internationalized well enough for others to use yet
The company behind Loongson has been very FOSS friendly. There was a 2009 Google Summer of Code project porting Debian (or was it Gentoo?) to Loongson CPU. https://opensource.googleblog.com/2009/05/2009-google-summer...
The CPU does supposedly have instruction set extensions for faster execution of binary code translated from x86, ARM and RISC-V. They think that it would be sufficient for running Windows/x86 apps at near-native speed in QEMU.
No ISA spec has been published. A few research articles are available from Chinese universities but most are only available in Chinese.
>or maybe my perception of China open source is biased.
FWIW The Chinese government seems to be trying to encourage open source, they even run their own equivalent of github called gitee. https://gitee.com/explore
Its a perfect attack vector for Chinese hackers.