Loongson 2K1000 Linux Support Still Getting Brought Up With New Kernel Patches

Chinese MIPS64 vendor Loongson announced the 2K1000 back in 2017 and while it has already been succeeded by more advanced chips in the Loongson 3 series, the Linux driver support for the 2K1000 is still coming together.

The Loongson 2K1000 is their dual-core 40nm part from 2017 that has around a 1.0GHz clock frequency for the MIPS64r2 LoongISA 1.0 processor. While Loongson generally enjoys good Linux support for their hardware, it's taken a while for this 2K1000 support to come together.

Sent out this morning were the latest patches providing basic support for the Loongson-2K1000 with some 700+ lines of new code, including the DeviceTree addition. This though is only the basic support and doesn't yet include SMP support or enabling other peripherals.

Early patches for the 2K1000 support have been available via external trees while this effort is obviously about getting the code upstreamed. Likewise there have been third-party Debian builds and other distributions for getting the Loongson 2K1000 booting with the external code - see the Debian Wiki for details on the 2K1000 support in its out-of-tree state.

Meanwhile for those that missed the other MIPS news this week, MIPS Technologies is now said to be abandoning the MIPS architecture for new CPU developments and will instead be focusing on RISC-V moving forward.