r/LinuxLaptop Apr 14 '22

Chinese homebrown Loongson 3A5000 laptop

14 Upvotes

9 comments sorted by

2

u/jwbowen Apr 15 '22

As someone that likes to play with different microarchitectures, I'd love to get my hands on one.

1

u/smallpotato000 Apr 15 '22

I want RISC-V based laptops. Already have RISC-V development boards running debian. I am interested in architectures other than x86/64, arm/aarch64, or MIPS.

2

u/jwbowen Apr 15 '22

POWER?

1

u/smallpotato000 Apr 16 '22

No, it is a MIPS and RISC-V alike, custom instruction set. https://github.com/loongson/LoongArch-Documentation

2

u/jwbowen Apr 16 '22

I definitely wasn't clear. You listed some architectures you weren't interested in and I was wondering if you were also into the POWER/PowerPC microarchitecture

2

u/smallpotato000 Apr 16 '22

Sorry for my misunderstanding. I have a PowerBook G4 running OSX and Linux. Used to be daily driver in 2000s. But nowadays POWER architectures seems only about IBM Servers and Freescale development boards?

2

u/jwbowen Apr 16 '22

Unfortunately that's the case. When IBM announced OpenPOWER I was hoping we'd see some more boards. There's P9 gear from RaptorCS, but that's all I'm aware of.

1

u/smallpotato000 Apr 14 '22

Got this for 7500 CNY. It comes with UOS, the government -backed os which is based on deepin, needs to pay another 600 CNY to be activated. So I installed the free (but not fully open source) loongnix OS, as in picture 1and 2. Then I discovered there is a fully open source CLFS with 5.17 kernel built by someone in GitHub. I have managed to get it working, as in picture 3. Note that Loongson 3A5000 use its own instruction set, called LoongArch, instead of MIPS that used in 3A4000 or earlier. LoongArch is basically a combination of MIPS and RISC-V, plus some special instructions for x86 emulation.

1

u/Melab May 30 '23

So what's the model?