LoongArch Patches Posted Again For Trying To Get This Chinese MIPS-Derived CPU In Linux

Loongson engineers continue working on aiming to upstream their LoongArch CPU architecture support in the Linux kernel.

LoongArch as a reminder is the new CPU architecture derived from MIPS64 and is China's effort for having a domestic CPU architecture capable for desktop and server platforms. Loongson describes it as "LoongArch is a new RISC ISA, which is a bit like MIPS or RISC-V. LoongArch includes a reduced 32-bit version (LA32R), a standard 32-bit version (LA32S) and a 64-bit version (LA64)."

The v9 patches published this morning re-base the series against the latest Linux 5.18 Git upstream state, fix 4-level page table handling, set to always use a 16KB kernel stack, enables efistub and zboot support, and has various other fixes and code improvements.

The LoongArch Linux kernel support in its current form is around twenty-four thousand lines of new code.

The LoongArch kernel support had been blocked as well by lacking a mainline compiler with LoongArch compiler support, but GCC 12 recently merged LoongArch support there and thus addressing the compiler prerequisite. We'll see if LoongArch manages to come for the v5.19 kernel or if its mainlining gets dragged out further.