Loongson 2K1000 Support Merged For Linux 5.13
While the MIPS-based Loongson processors are known for being open-source friendly and for a time were trumpeted by Stallman, the older 2K1000 series support has been out-of-tree the past few years and only now being mainlined.
2K1000 Linux patches were sent out again in March for review and this time deemed ready for mainline. That 2K1000 support then was sent in and merged last week as part of the MIPS architecture updates.
While the latest of the Loongson 2 series, it's since been succeeded by the more powerful Loongson 3 series. The 2K1000 is a 1GHz MIPS64r2 dual-core design. The 2K1000 is manufactured on a 40nm process and was first introduced in 2017. Like with the sad state of MIPS processors these days, even the latest Loongson 3B4000 is still a quad-core design on a 28nm process but at least clocking around 2GHz. So the Loongson 2K1000 series isn't too worth getting excited about in 2021 unless you just happen to find your hands on such hardware you can now enjoy it with a mainline kernel rather than resorting to various out-of-tree/distribution patches.
Debian has been among the few Linux distributions supporting 2K1000 setups.
Aside from this long overdue Loongson 2K1000 support, there aren't any other major MIPS changes this cycle.
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