GCC Compiler Accepts China's MIPS-Derived LoongArch CPU Port

The GCC steering committee has signed off on the LoongArch compiler port and could still land for the GCC 12 stable compiler release in a few weeks.

LoongArch is the CPU architecture developed by Chinese hardware vendor Loongson and based on MIPS 64-bit with various modifications. Loongson has been working on the GCC compiler port for a while along with the Linux kernel changes and other software stack support.

Loongson's kernel work on LoongArch was criticized for duplicating lots of MIPS code but has still been working through that and then the main blocker on getting the Linux kernel code introduced shifted to the lack of mainline GCC compiler support.

The LoongArch ISA docs can be found on GitHub.

The GCC steering committee announced on Friday they have accepted the LoongArch port for inclusion. They hope that this will still land in time for the GCC 12.1 stable release that will be out in April or May.

Loongson 3A5000 benchmarks aren't the most promising right now for the initial LoongArch ISA hardware but will be interesting to see how Loongson can evolve the hardware and software support moving forward for this Chinese domestic architecture.

Loongson has also been working on LoongArch for LLVM.