MIPS Loongson 3 Seeing Support Improvements With Linux 5.7

For those managing to get their hands on a recently released Loongson 3A4000/3B4000 or even older Loongson 3 MIPS64 processors, improving the support is on the way with the upcoming Linux 5.7 kernel.

Queued as part of the MIPS architecture work for Linux 5.7 are a number of Loongson improvements, in particular for the Loongson 3 series.

The additions for this next version of the Linux kernel include a generic Device Tree for Loongson 3 devices, Desktop Management Interface (DMI) for MIPS (generic to the MIPS architecture but contributed By Loongson engineers), a Loongson I/O local interrupt controller driver, a HyperTransport PIC controller driver, and various other changes currently staging within the MIPS development tree. The generic Loongson 3 DTS support should help in allowing mainline Linux images to run nicely on more devices.

Unfortunately these MIPS64 desktop systems are still difficult to acquire outside of China. The latest Loongson 3 processors feature four MIPS64r5 cores with clock speeds up to 2.0GHz and fabbed on a 28nm process. So while the hardware is fairly libre friendly, it's another case of not being performant class hardware for most use-cases.