Optimizing pixman for Loongson: Process and Results
The Lemote Yeeloong is a small notebook that is often the computer of choice for Free Software advocates, including Richard Stallman. It's powered by an 800 MHz STMicroelectronics Loongson 2F processor and has an antiquated Silicon Motion 712 graphics chip. The SM712's acceleration features are pretty subpar for today's standards, and performance of the old XFree86 Acceleration Architecture (XAA) that supports the SM712 has slowly decayed as developers move to support newer hardware and newer acceleration architectures. In short, graphics performance of the SM712 isn't very good with new X servers, so how can we improve it?
Read More – – Tags: freedesktop gentoo linux loongson mips pixman xorg yeeloong
New multilib N32 Gentoo MIPS Stages
Gentoo/MIPS has been in, well, not great shape for quite some time. When I was going through Gentoo recruitment, there were no stages (used for installing Gentoo) newer than 2008, so this was one of the main things I wanted to improve, specifically by creating new N32 ABI stages. Even though the N32 (meaning New 32-bit) ABI was introduced in IRIX in 1996 to replace SGI's o32 (Old 32-bit) ABI, Linux support for N32 has lagged behind until the last few years. Now, I'm pleased to unofficially announce new multilib N32 stages and that we'll be supporting as the preferred ABI.
Read More – – Tags: gentoo linux mips
The Loongson 3A (Godson 3A) looks nice!
The Loongson 3A (or Godson 3A) is the successor to the Loongson 2F used in systems like the Lemote Yeelong and Gdium Liberty 1000. According to the Chinese review site EXPreview, the first production of Godson 3A CPUs has completed. (Specs and motherboard pictures below.)
Read More – – Tags: hardware mips
How to enable SSL-IRC-access to Freenode and OFTC with XChat
The two main IRC networks I use are Freenode and OFTC. I've always liked the idea (though I don't currently make use of it) of things like HTTPS Everywhere, and I remember being disappointed the last time I checked if major IRC networks supported SSL. For some reason, I checked tonight and found out they do! Here's how to set it up with XChat on Linux.
Fix for Creative ZEN V Plus won't connect: Code-10
I just spent the better part of my afternoon figuring out what the hell was wrong with my girlfriend's Creative ZEN V Plus MP3 player. It froze yesterday and hasn't been able to connect to our computers since. Everytime she turned it on, it said Rebuilding Library, but it normally only does that during the boot immediately after it froze and has to be manually reset. It wouldn't connect in Linux, and in Windows the obnoxious balloon tips would report "MTP device found" again and again. In the Device Manager, it reported "Code 10: Device cannot start." Well, we finally found a fix.