Loongson Improvements Land In Linux 5.7 To Improve The Chinese MIPS CPUs

The MIPS architecture improvements for Linux 5.7 are headlined by Loongson support improvements for those Chinese manufactured MIPS64 platforms.

As outlined last month, a number of Loongson 3 support improvements were worked on by Loongson engineers and the community. Included as part of the MIPS CPU updates for Linux 5.7 are a generic Device Tree for Loongson 3 devices, Desktop Management Interface (DMI) support for MIPS, a Loongson I/O local interrupt controller driver, and a Hyper Transport PIC controller driver. The generic Loongson 3 DTS support should help in allowing mainline Linux images to run nicely on more devices.

These Loongson improvements and other MIPS material landed this past week into the Linux 5.7 codebase.

Loongson 3A4000/3B4000 are the newest revision from last year and feature up to four 28nm MIPS64r5 CPUs running up to 2.0GHz with an 80 Watt TDP and 8MB L3 cache. Not all that impressive compared to today's modern x86_64 / Arm / POWER CPUs, but the Loongson hardware does tend to be Linux/open-source friendly and popular within China for domestic hardware.