Linux Kernel Support For The Loongson-3

[JanC]

Do any MIPS systems have OpenGL support?

Obviously, you don't know the history of MIPS & OpenGL...

OpenGL started life as GL, the graphics library used by SGI (Silicon Graphics).

SGI was also the first major user of MIPS processors (starting late 1980s), the first to use MIPS64, and at some point they even bought the company behind the MIPS technology.

So basically, you can say OpenGL was literally designed for MIPS, and most 3D/CGI work for Hollywood during the 1990s was probably done on MIPS-based computer systems (both OpenGL workstations and render servers).

[blackiwid]

I think you need to wait for the 32nm loongson 3B refresh. because that cpu really need the 8mb L3 cache. They also upgrade from the hd3200 radeon to a hd4200 radeon chipset. means a much better gpu also for there notebooks.
right now you need to be very hardcore to buy a notebook for 1000€ with less performance than a 300-400€ notebook from intel.
With the 32nm 3B refresh you maybe also pay 1000€ but you get hardware like a 500€ notebook.

but i hope they become completive in the future.

I dont think there is a way to buy the longson 3 thing in europe, I did only find a shop that sells the older 2er one for 200 bucks or so... but if it would really cost 1000 bucks and its the normal classic 2,5 year guarantied death by design thing... I would not buy it... btw, I have problem that I like this thinkpoint thing... but who knows... maybe in 2-3 years the next or next-next book is something for me...

but maybe I switch finaly to intel... if they get this gpu-accellerated video shit in low-cost chips then...

[necro-lover]

how good does x264 and webm work on such quad or manycore cpus as example the 4core is there some gpu acceleration or is the cpu better in doing that.

I hate in on my zacate systems that 120% of the cpu is used (1core + 20% of the second core) for gstreamer based movie apps (totem / minitube...) so that browsing and other stuff really gets slow when I have a video on some other screen. I mean yes a i7 is much faster than this mips chips no question but if you want a powersaving machine, like a zacate I think it should be close or because of the 4 cores maybe the loongsons are even faster?

Its at least impressive what they do with a crappy shit 100 year old 65nm process. would nice to see a 32core 22nm version of that, and that could be very cheep, and also still in <50Watts.


GPUs are useless, they get maybe usefull drivers (I mean except basic drawing of the screen and a year2000 opengl 1.3 deskop acceleration speed...) when nobody use them anymore... if even than...

hope cpus can become better, because gpus failed because the impossibility to write proper software for it...


and yes even if amd would release finaly good opensource drivers, like as example intel does at least for some gpus (some do support hardware accelerated video encoding, so for the user this gpus are stronger and the intel cpus are stronger anyway)... they would not commit to openbios and such stuff... so I really love that stuff, and if it is fast enough fro me, minitube and browser and movies without having all cores involved do work with that and its somewhat power efficient I will switch to that. even if the x86 alternatives would be theoreticaly stronger in some wether-calculations or 3d games... with proprietary drivers.

I think you need to wait for the 32nm loongson 3B refresh. because that cpu really need the 8mb L3 cache. They also upgrade from the hd3200 radeon to a hd4200 radeon chipset. means a much better gpu also for there notebooks.
right now you need to be very hardcore to buy a notebook for 1000? with less performance than a 300-400? notebook from intel.
With the 32nm 3B refresh you maybe also pay 1000? but you get hardware like a 500? notebook.

but i hope they become completive in the future.

[blackiwid]

Don't use gstreamer-based sw then. It's widely known not to be fast.

Measure with mplayer or some other direct, ffmpeg-based app instead.

that does not help me very much, when nobody uses mplayer anymore kde and gnome dont use mplayerbased standard player. And yes even if I use mplayer its 70% vs 2% with a crap intel netbook or something that has va-api enabled drivers. And there is/was no minitube mplayer version or something similar. I wrote some kind of replacement, but is that the way to do write your own mediaplayer to have a bit better experience. gstreamer seems to be newer, the higher cpu-usage doesnt stop people using it, because they say in 5 years each pc is fast enough to easily decode a fullhd stream with the cpu part.

but again even if amd would in 20 years or so programm in such a shaderbased decoder, I still would be interessted in such alternative hardware, because amds step in coreboot and so on are also very non-existent, yes there are a hand full of boards of desktop systems but thats not enough. its nearly imposible to build such a system if you have not 1000 euro extra. then you still have all the firmwares everywhere... its no freesoftware experience... if they do such stuff with this Loongson-systems I am very interessted.

[curaga]

Don't use gstreamer-based sw then. It's widely known not to be fast.

Measure with mplayer or some other direct, ffmpeg-based app instead.

[blackiwid]

how good does x264 and webm work on such quad or manycore cpus as example the 4core is there some gpu acceleration or is the cpu better in doing that.

I hate in on my zacate systems that 120% of the cpu is used (1core + 20% of the second core) for gstreamer based movie apps (totem / minitube...) so that browsing and other stuff really gets slow when I have a video on some other screen. I mean yes a i7 is much faster than this mips chips no question but if you want a powersaving machine, like a zacate I think it should be close or because of the 4 cores maybe the loongsons are even faster?

Its at least impressive what they do with a crappy shit 100 year old 65nm process. would nice to see a 32core 22nm version of that, and that could be very cheep, and also still in <50Watts.


GPUs are useless, they get maybe usefull drivers (I mean except basic drawing of the screen and a year2000 opengl 1.3 deskop acceleration speed...) when nobody use them anymore... if even than...

hope cpus can become better, because gpus failed because the impossibility to write proper software for it...


and yes even if amd would release finaly good opensource drivers, like as example intel does at least for some gpus (some do support hardware accelerated video encoding, so for the user this gpus are stronger and the intel cpus are stronger anyway)... they would not commit to openbios and such stuff... so I really love that stuff, and if it is fast enough fro me, minitube and browser and movies without having all cores involved do work with that and its somewhat power efficient I will switch to that. even if the x86 alternatives would be theoreticaly stronger in some wether-calculations or 3d games... with proprietary drivers.

[chithanh]

And on that wiki page it is explicitly stated that it is not about running x86 Windows programs on ARM. Which requires the normal x86 wine and typically uses qemu-user mode.

[necro-lover]

Hmm just a thought, would windows programs work through wine on the Loongson (or any MIPS processors)? (I don't know the internals of wine...)
Edit: http://wiki.winehq.org/Debunking_Win...a847305a78b78f

I am willing to move to a MIPS processor in the future, however, it would be great to know the advantages/disadvantages.
As I am using Debian, the move would be simple I assume, as a lot of common packages would be readily available.

PS: 我学习中文！ 我的中文不好。

ARM do have the same problem and the wine people work on it: http://wiki.winehq.org/ARM

If ARM works then MIPS is not far away but right now there is no work for MIPS there.

[chithanh]

Putting gpu stuff aside, Maybe the entire stable release of MIPS is available but we all know how ancient that is, in Linux years anyway. I'm sure a lot of Sid or wheezy is available for MIPS but I'm sure it breaks more often than x86 or ARM. But, just because all, or most of Debian is available, it doesn't mean that has everything you need.

An informal count based on this reveals the following binary package numbers in Debian Wheezy:

mipsel: 35643
amd64: 36503

So you have more than 97% of Debian packages available on mipsel compared to amd64. Including many that require OpenGL.

It could be that the packages are out-of-date or compile but don't run, however a quick search at the bugtracker doesn't turn up bug reports in numbers which would significantly affect the above result.

There are plenty of packages that Debian doesn't offer on any platform, and not all of them are MIPS compatible.

There is a lot to complain about Debian, but the lack of software choice ain't among it. In fact the debian-mipsel package count beats every other x86 distro out there.

In the open source world, just about anything can be ported but it doesn't mean someone has.

That is why I asked what specifically needs porting in your opinion.

[smitty3268]

Hmm just a thought, would windows programs work through wine on the Loongson (or any MIPS processors)? (I don't know the internals of wine...)

No. WINE is not an emulator.