Mesa 23.1 Gets Basic LoongArch Support

Merged this past week into Mesa 23.1 is initial support for Loongson's LoongArch CPU architecture.

Loongson engineers have spent much time over the past two years or so on providing upstream/mainline support for LoongArch across the Linux kernel, the GNU and LLVM toolchains, and various other high profile components. LoongArch is the Chinese MIPS64-derived, RISC-V-inspired CPU architecture being used for the newest Loongson processors that previously had a long history of being open-source friendly and based on MIPS64.

The newest LoongArch upstream software work to talk about is Mesa 23.1 seeing initial support. This "basic support" comes down to Meson build system updates so that on LoongArch64 a subset of the Gallium3D drivers are compiled as well as the AMD and software rasterizer Vulkan drivers. Plus for LoongArch defines "USE_LOONGARCH64_ASM" so that any LoongArch specific Assembly added in the future and protected by that define will be enabled.

The initial merge request for what has landed so far also goes on to note by Loongson that there are some additional patches around LLVMpipe support on LoongArch.

In the past Loongson MIPS64 systems have been popular with some open-source AMD graphics usage while moving forward it will be interesting to see if Loongson pursues (or licenses) any integrated graphics of their own for LoongArch SoCs. In any case, come Mesa 23.1 next quarter this tiny stride on LoongArch support will be in place.