Loongson/mips64el n32 status

Message

manphiz · Post by **manphiz** » Wed Dec 01, 2021 9:34 pm

Hi,

I have a Yeeloong netbook running Loongson 2F CPU and would like to try out Gentoo. I have seen several posts about loongson on this forum over the years so hopefully there are still some activity around this arch but would like to gather some info before actually doing that. Here are a few questions in my mind.

* There was a unpack and ready to use image back in 2014 (https://gentoo.osuosl.org/experimental/ ... oongson2f/). I wonder whether there is any new install media available for Loongson 2F
* If I use this to install gentoo, is there any tip for updating portage to the latest snapshot? IIRC last time I tried to do "emerge --sync" a few years back there was some Python requirement not met and I ended up in a circular dependency mess.
* How's the general support for mips64el n32? I seems to find that mips is no longer an available arch in most portage packages. Is it now unsupported?

Thanks in advance.

My Wiki page · Post by **mattst88** » Tue Dec 14, 2021 3:00 am

I've got a Yeeloong and some other MIPS hardware that I used to revive the port about 10 years ago.

Unfortunately, all of my hardware is either unstable or far too slow.

The Yeeloong is far too slow. Additionally, the SATA driver for the Yeeloong generates spurious interrupts and makes the hardware even slower than it already was. The older PATA driver has now been removed from the kernel upstream.

I've basically given up on it, as have the other two Gentoo developers who own Yeeloongs.

I tried for years to get Lemote/Loongson to send me faster hardware, and they did. Unfortunately, one machine was wrecked in shipping and never booted, and the other was unstable and would hardlock.

It's going to be pretty difficult to get Gentoo installed on a MIPS system using current stages. We're building stages for other hardware using QEMU (alpha, m68k, riscv). We could also do stages for MIPS presumably, but we have basically no developers or users so it's not clear to me that it's worth it.

manphiz · Post by **manphiz** » Tue Dec 14, 2021 9:42 pm

Thanks Matt! Yeah this machine is really slow that it took a week to just build LLVM in OpenBSD. I've been running OpenBSD on it for a few years but recently their LLVM fails to build GCC on mips64el[1] so a lot of ports cannot be built so I thought it might be time to get my hands dirty again

I understand that this is now on a best-effort kind of situation. I'll just see how far I can make then. In best case maybe I can have a newer stage3 for other people to try this out.

mattst88 wrote:[..snip..]
The Yeeloong is far too slow. Additionally, the SATA driver for the Yeeloong generates spurious interrupts and makes the hardware even slower than it already was. The older PATA driver has now been removed from the kernel upstream.
[..snip..]

Just want to confirm that the SATA driver is still working for Yeeloong just slower than expected, right? So that the kernel can still boot the system so that it's not a lost battle already

P.S. Go Pen-Pen master race!

[1] https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-bugs&m=163819813606131&w=2

My Wiki page · Post by **mattst88** » Wed Dec 15, 2021 6:31 pm

Yes, I've definitely had the system working with the SATA driver.

manphiz · Post by **manphiz** » Thu Dec 16, 2021 2:52 pm

mattst88 wrote:Yes, I've definitely had the system working with the SATA driver.

Thanks for confirming!

XiaoaiX · Post by **XiaoaiX** » Sat May 21, 2022 4:17 am

I've got my Yeeloong netbook updated to the latest gentoo-n32 version. I also change to systemd. Is it possible to build a stage3 tarball from it?