Linux Kernel Support For The Loongson-3

[mybug]

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。

[smitty3268]

If you would read up on how chinese firewall and all those media clone sites work, you will realise that in many places china versions offer much more freedom; there are only several things protected and they are all about politics.

Have you ever been in China and seen the effects personally?

I haven't, so i can't really say anything for sure, but I know people who have, and they tell me that it's a real annoyance. Lots of websites they try to use (which generally have nothing to do with politics) get blocked. Most likely because of some keyword that just shows up in a comment some where or other on the page, and it's auto-blocked. Of course i imagine that's more of a problem for foreigners trying to access their foreign-language sites - it's likely less of an issue for native Chinese, especially since they've grown up with the system and know how to work around it.

But I think you're mistaken to just pass it off as nothing that any other government doesn't also do. The Chinese system is different from what western countries do.

[d557charger]

re

As far as I know China has a respectable sized middle class. Although you are correct there are a lot more poor than not. However, I've heard that China has more rich upper class citizens than america has citizens, period.

I also agree with you that for the foreseeable future, Loongson wont be very impressive. I certainly will be sticking with x86 over any of the other platforms. But radical shifts can and do happen in the technology world. Something that has perceived value today may not tomorrow. Something now comical may become an essential business tool. You never know...

As for Valve games ans Chinese Language support, the Half Life games all have Chinese Language support. Neither Portal game has it though. (i was trying to run my steam catalogue in Korean and saw tons of languages for the HL games, including both traditional and modern chinese support..though I suspect that it is used by Chinese speaking US residents and citizens).


Im also unsure what kind of political hurdles Valve might face releasing steam in China. Its doing fair in Russia and S.Korea though.

Cheers.

[schmidtbag]

I only wanted to point out that rather than try to catch a relatively small market segments in America and the west,(with a console) Valve could very well have its eye on a substantially larger pie. Currently, the only native OS in China that I'm aware of is a Linux Distro, so, were I Chinese, I would support the local stuff - just like as a Pennsylvanian, I drink Yuengling Lager (although I currently work, spread the Open Source Gospel, and reside in the Republic of Korea (S.Korea)).

Valve, in preparation for entering that market in a few years (guess??), might be adding Linux support if only for the reason that that market may have a significant number or Linux users by that time. Also, who knows whether or not, 5 yrs from now, the Loongson chip family wouldn't be running on the majority of Chinese Desktops? Reguardless of Loongson, the OS being used alone is the big kicker. And not just China but a lot of places in the world outside of Europe, U.S., etc, are running Linux distros and as they are newer to the computer field, Linux has a better chance to establish itself in those markets.

It was only speculation, and I certainly meant no hatred - do head crabs not consume all humans equally?

ok now I see your point, but valve probably wouldn't make as much money from china as you may expect. I'm not sure if any of valves products, even steam for that matter, are even translated to Chinese. They might be I'm not sure. I'm also not sure if there are enough people in china wealthy enough to get into Valve products. While the population is immense, many of Chinese people would be considered severely povershed by western nation standards. That being said, they wouldn't generate enough revenue. China is also a huge piracy nation.

In a hardware perspective, you're basically implying that MIPS, which IMO is of the lowest performing modern desktop CPU architectures, will end up being not only popular enough but powerful enough to compete with today's x86 processors. For now, valve is probably taking this 1 step at a time and making sure that they can get steam working on Linux in general. MIPS is probably a lower priority than ARM for valve, and I don't see them getting into ARM in the next few years. Today, china is probably more focused on VIA's systems (rather than MIPS), which are x86 based and they have pretty terrible Linux support.

[d557charger]

I said, "down the road"

I only wanted to point out that rather than try to catch a relatively small market segments in America and the west,(with a console) Valve could very well have its eye on a substantially larger pie. Currently, the only native OS in China that I'm aware of is a Linux Distro, so, were I Chinese, I would support the local stuff - just like as a Pennsylvanian, I drink Yuengling Lager (although I currently work, spread the Open Source Gospel, and reside in the Republic of Korea (S.Korea)).

Valve, in preparation for entering that market in a few years (guess??), might be adding Linux support if only for the reason that that market may have a significant number or Linux users by that time. Also, who knows whether or not, 5 yrs from now, the Loongson chip family wouldn't be running on the majority of Chinese Desktops? Reguardless of Loongson, the OS being used alone is the big kicker. And not just China but a lot of places in the world outside of Europe, U.S., etc, are running Linux distros and as they are newer to the computer field, Linux has a better chance to establish itself in those markets.

It was only speculation, and I certainly meant no hatred - do head crabs not consume all humans equally?

[necro-lover]

What I expect is from you -- some substance to back up your statement. If there isn't a body of open source contributions today then why do you assume there will be "25-50x" as much spending (relative to revenues) in the future ?

Based on the sales and the investment money they do not only spend 25-50x more money on opensource its more than 1000times.... more but hey maybe the investment slows down in the future.
Maybe its only because they are "new" on the market.

Nice try, but you're the one making misleading statements not Loongson...

If i web-surf on there website then "Opensource(freesoftware) matters" is the headline do you need a screen shot? if i surf on the amd website only closed source microsoft shit pop up. Source: http://www.loongson.cn/dev/community/ and http://www.amd.com/de/Pages/AMDHomePage.aspx AMD only make advertising for Microsoft they give a shit about Linux (in there advertising).

or was "hitting children" referring to me disagreeing with you ?

Who knows in what league you play in? Hitting Childens freedom with DRM technique is what you are strong in right? Maybe related childrens can answer this "Blue-ray" questions?

You choose your own league! its your choice.

[bridgman]

Last time i checked loongson do have a 0.0000x% market share even if they spend 25times more than amd the impact is small ... What do you expect from a market participant with a market share of 0.0000x%?

What I expect is from you -- some substance to back up your statement. If there isn't a body of open source contributions today then why do you assume there will be "25-50x" as much spending (relative to revenues) in the future ?

ye I know hitting children is what big boys from amd+intels do because they can not fight against a real enemy.

Nice try, but you're the one making misleading statements not Loongson... or was "hitting children" referring to me disagreeing with you ?

[ldesnogu]

Obviously some went into modifying QEMU to use the x86 emulation instructions in the microcode, and modifying existing open source drivers to work on the Loongson CPU, but your comment seems to suggest there is a lot more going on. EnQuiring minds want to know

As far as I know their version of QEMU isn't available. And for sure it isn't in QEMU mainline.

[schmidtbag]

@necro-lover
your name should be righteousness lover, since you seem to blatantly ignore what I'm saying and start spewing things I either made no reference to or are unrelated.

First of all, those instruction sets you mentioned aren't focused on virtualization, so it won't make it run faster. Besides, most of those are stuff the P4 had - there's a lot that MIPS is missing. I didn't say anything about freedom and/with windows. what I was saying is the Chinese government likes to censor things and (x86) windows offers a lot of choices of commercial software that they might not approve of. with android and windows RT, ARM will eventually be in the same category.

MIPS isn't fast for everyday desktop use because it wasn't supposed to be used that way, it just has the option. waiting for MIPS to prove it would be like waiting for motorcycles to tow small trailers. Sure it could be done but why not just get a vehicle that was supposed to do it from the beginning?

Also, I never said ANYTHING about a DRM. Once again, you're putting words in my mouth. What I was trying to say, which should have been obvious, was that MIPS being a relatively ignored platform for desktop use just simply doesn't have as much hardware or software attention as x86, PPC, or ARM. That being said, not everything will work on it, at least not without some effort.

I also said NOTHING about the Chinese government being evil. You accuse me of being naive but you're just simply being arrogant and ignorant. The Chinese have censorship laws. they don't allow all websites to be seen, they don't allow all software to come in either. That's not evil, but I wouldn't say they're guardian angels either.

As for your other post, I didn't say MIPS couldn't HANDLE OpenGL, I was asking if there were currently any platforms with an OpenGL compatible GPU. From what I know, most MIPS platforms are headless.

Please read before you start ranting, because you're pointlessly fighting me for things I'm not even saying or would ever say.


@crazycheeze
I know china's censorship isn't that bad, but it's considerably worse than most other places in the world. Bad enough to the point that they tried hacking google to change search results and ended up making their own search engine to replace google within their own country. and obviously there are parts of china that don't have restrictions. First of all, the country is huge. it's pretty hard to moderate over 2 billion people. Secondly, china doesn't even like to admit some people in the country are actual residents, I'm sure these people, if they can afford Internet access, are not using the main land's ISPs. Thirdly, Chinese people who can afford an ISP by themselves tend to be very intelligent people and can probably bypass firewalls.

As for open hardware platforms, I didn't say MIPS wasn't, I just said it doesn't have a big market in desktop or mobile PCs.

[necro-lover]

Do any MIPS systems have OpenGL support?

Every mips system can handle openGL... some of them only with the CPU and some others with the GPU.
The newest loongson notebook to have a radeon hd3250 openGL3 gpu.