Loongson 2K1000 Support Queued Ahead Of Linux 5.13

Earlier this month I mentioned Loongson 2K1000 Linux patches were published with an effort now to upstream them some four years after these 40nm dual-core MIPS-based hardware launched. That Loongson-2K1000 support is now queued in MIPS-next ahead of the Linux 5.13 cycle.

The Loongson 2K1000 was the last of the Loongson line-up released in 2017 and succeeded by the Loongson 3 series. The 2K1000 hardware isn't too interesting from the hardware perspective these days with the Loongson 3 being more capable albeit still not too par with the likes of current Intel or AMD processors nor even POWER and AArch64 modern offerings. But Loongson remains popular within China for a domestic CPU offering as well as those around the world wanting a fully libre system.

Loongson 2K1000 Linux support patches have been available for years now via external/out-of-tree kernel builds for those Linux distributions focusing on Loongson/MIPS support. But finally recently this support for upstream has come together thanks to Loongson engineers.

As of this week the initial 2K1000 support was queued into MIPS' "mips-next" branch on Git ahead of the Linux 5.13 merge window opening in a few weeks time. Thus at that point the support for this dual-core ~1.0GHz hardware will be upstream.