Loongson Adds LoongArch Support To LibreOffice

Following GCC 12 introducing LoongArch support earlier this year, Linux 5.19 adding the initial LoongArch port, and Glibc 2.36 adding LoongArch, LibreOffice is now the latest high-profile open-source project adding support for this Chinese processor ISA that started out derived from MIPS64.

Loongson as the company behind LoongArch contributed the native support for running the LibreOffice open-source office suite on LoongArch 64-bit hardware.

Adding LoongArch support to the LibreOffice open-source office suite took 1,630 lines of new code with changes from the build system to hundreds of lines of new C++ code. Currently this LoongArch LibreOffice support is just for building on Linux.

Loongson's 3A5000 is their first LoongArch 64-bit CPU, but the performance isn't that special. It will be interesting to see if their future generations of LoongArch processors and once having a mature software stack can make this RISC-based processor architecture more competitive to Arm, x86_64, and RISC-V.

Those curious about this LoongArch support for LibreOffice can find it via this Git commit that merged to mainline this morning.