2014 news about MIPS Loongson hardware
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1) http://www.loongson.cn/news_info.php?id=259
Recently, ICT has launched the Loongson-3B six-core desktop solution. Loongson-3B is a six-core high-performance general-purpose MIPS processor using 32nm manufacturing process, which is working at frequency of 1.2 GHz.
http://www.loongson.cn/uploadfile/201404/20140411035647203.jpg
Technical specifications:
* standard Mini-ITX motherboard with Loongson-3B CPU
* ATI RS780E [AMD 780E] southbridge with 128MB integrated graphics
* ATI SBx00 Azalia on-board audio
* up to 16 GB DDR3 memory
* Intel 82574L gigabit network interface
* PCI, PCIe, SATA, USB and other peripheral interfaces
* thanks to good scalability, could be additionally equipped with discrete graphics AMD HD6770 and SSD drive
Leaked benchmark test results:
http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1404098-SO-3B1W2703307
This desktop solution is using an optimized version of Fedora 13, with a lot of software available, such as WPS office suite. Manufacturer states that the user experience has been significantly improved, if to compare with Loongson-3A predecessor, and is aimed on government/military users, and for everyone else who cares a lot about privacy.
This looks like an excellent candidate to become an open hardware.
But, whats about GPU blobs?
The development of Loongson is conducted by ICT - Institute of Computing Technology , which is backed by Chinese government. And, in the middle of 2012, NVIDIA lost a huge GPU order from them, due to _closed-source blob_ :
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyNTE
It gives us hope that Chinese government and AMD have reached an agreement, the result of which is 100% open-source graphics solution
From leaked benchmark test results, I could see that:
* display driver is open-source radeon 6.14.99
* OpenGL runs with the help of open-source Mesa 9.2.5 and Gallium 0.4
2) http://www.loongson.cn/news_info.php?id=260
http://www.loongson.cn/uploadfile/201404/20140411034220232.jpg
This "OpenLoong" board, based on Loongson-1C cpu, could be used for the same purposes as Raspberry Pi and Arduino, while providing higher performance than them. Could be used as board for MiniPC / DIY netbook, as well as for small home file/printer server. Future versions would have more powerful CPU from Loongson-3 family
I am a member!
I doubt it. AMD's pulled the wool over our eyes in an effort to pacify the larger community and doesn't appear to really care about free software. Then again, does any company? That is not to say that there aren't people within who care and/or business models built around free software. What I'm saying is it's not being done by the company for altruistic reasons and I'm doubtful any government has the intelligence to force the matter for security related reasons.
While it is a critical component for security and privacy that software be free it's not the only necessity. We really do need to do more to secure free software. However there are a lack of developers and a lack of developers who code properly or spend the time to do independent code reviews. We also need clear community development going on. Having code developed in private by large corporations and then published is not ideal. It is much better to write good code your consciously aware will be reviewed by others from the beginning then to clean it up later.
In an ideal situation we would have plenty of developers and there would be lots of code review of every commit by at least 1-2 others.
I don't expect any improvement here: it still needs Radeon blobs (VGA ROM and microcode), the devices available in Europe will be expensive, code needed for them while released won't be contributed upstream, there will be no English documentation, so no one will have a Loongson 3B device nor port a free distro to it. (There are minor improvements, like SPI flash for boot firmware.)
The NVIDIA order situation is bad: only Nouveau replaces nonfree firmware used for GPUs, if the VGA ROM was replaced (I don't know if only data or code too is needed from it), there would be a fully free Loongson 3 system. I think the blob issue for Loongson was not that the NVIDIA driver is nonfree, but that NVIDIA wouldn't port it to MIPS. I don't think blobs are an issue for a company distributing the Flash player, Radeon VGA ROMs or microcode.
Radeon blobs used on RS780 might be easy to replace: for the VGA ROM, there is more register documentation than for newer chipsets, the RadeonHD driver supports modesetting on a similar chip without the blob (and the whole issue is easy: replace interpreted code in a known instruction set, with a free interpreter); microcode has unknown instruction sets while the Freedreno project has partially guessed the R600 microcode format (and there are simple ways to get more information). We don't have enough developers or they prefer Intel systems.
Lack of English documentation is why I'm completely not interested in Loongson 1C, even if SBCs with it were as popular as Raspberry Pi here.
I guess if you don't care about 3D acceleration, it would be fine. I don't think AMD will release the source code for the blobs. The Nvidia incident was because of the proprietary driver, not microcode. Is there anyone reverse engineering the microcode?
Nouveau has replaced most NVIDIA microcode needed for 3d acceleration. Freedreno reverse engineers the Adreno microcode that is very similar to Radeon R600. I don't know any projects working on other Radeon microcode (like R700 which has much different patterns than R600). It might be easy, probably the main difference is the license allowing distribution of unmodified firmware (and lack of known security issues: Nouveau developers found them in NVIDIA microcode).
I think free boot firmware (including the VGA ROM) is more important here: why else not get a well-supported, fast and more affordable ThinkPenguin laptop instead? (VGA ROMs are probably safer than the management engine firmware that recent Intel chipsets need. This doesn't affect the issue of running nonfree code with access to whole memory.)
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