Debian Adds Loongarch as Officially Supported Architecture
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Debian's latest move to officially support LoongArch architecture has sparked curiosity and excitement among tech enthusiasts, who are now scrambling to get their hands on LoongArch hardware, with some discovering that it's available on AliExpress. As commenters dug deeper, they uncovered resources like LoongFans and AreWeLoongYet, which provide insight into the Loongson Corporation's progress and community efforts. While some were initially skeptical about the authenticity of LoongArch chips, others clarified that LoongArch is a distinct architecture, separate from MIPS. The thread is abuzz with people sharing links to LoongArch hardware and documentation, fueling the enthusiasm for this emerging tech.
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I wonder if there is a way to get them from Taiwan / Korea. I can’t go to mainland China.
Where did I make that claim? I never said that.
https://loongfans.cn/en/pages/intro.html#i-m-sold-where-can-...
> 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.
-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.
Stallman actually daily drove a Loongson MIPS-based notebook for a while.
In contrast, Western corporate execs have an event horizon between "next quarterly reports" and "vesting/bonus period", and Western politicians of "next important election", so basically a few months as well because there is always an election going on in some state or local division.
You talk about "western" politicians, but this point feels like it only really applies to the US with its ridiculous two-year cycle.
Infrastructure projects can take decades. The country’s budget is a 0 sum game. Developing something expensive will lead to cuts or shortages somewhere else and those people suffering will make you pay in the next election because they won’t care about the greater good from 20 years from now.
Your opponents will exploit any perceived failure and use it against you. And they will equally take your victories and sell them as their own if they happen to bear fruit on their term. So everyone focuses on what looks good inside a term of a few years to sell in the next election.
It takes time for the horses to bring the electors to Washington.
Heh in Germany we have taken our sweet time as well. 2017 for example? That stretched into 2018, half a year [1].
The key difference is, while the outgoing executive holds their position until the new government coalition is formed, there is a strong tradition in a) the outgoing government to not abuse their positions to force their successors' hands, b) for everyone (including the far-left, excluding the far-right) to cooperate with each other to keep the country running and c) for cooperation across the aisles in general, even when there is a stable government. And there is no problem when the government/parliament cannot pass a budget either. Governmental authorities and public services keep on running assuming the last year's budget.
[1] https://www.mehr-demokratie.de/nachrichten/einzelansicht/die...
I'm German, it's even worse here because we have 16 states plus the EU elections and that means you have about three to five distinct elections in any given year. And with the exception of the small states no one gives a fuck about (sorry Saarland), each and every single of the state elections is seen as a sign for federal politics.
The big tech companies ran without profit for a long time. People worried a lot about that but they did it anyway.
this would do so much untold good, i hope i live to see it
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.
For the Loongson 3A6000, there is an independent performance review: https://chipsandcheese.com/p/loongson-3a6000-a-star-among-ch...
I couldn't find something comparable for C930 CPUs.
It takes several days to build the gcc-15 package in riscv64 but just a few hours on loong64.
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.
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
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?
https://www.alpinelinux.org/posts/Alpine-3.21.0-released.htm...
Nah, we added the loong64 in Debian already in 2023:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2023/08/msg00...
It was just promoted to being a release architecture.
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.
https://loongson.github.io/LoongArch-Documentation/LoongArch...
https://docs.kernel.org/arch/loongarch/introduction.html