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
Radeon X1550 in an SGI O2?
In a thread on the SGI Enthusiast site, Nekochan.net, about Linux compatibility with SGI's MIPS based line of workstations, a user, tillin9, suggested the possibility of installing modern, off the shelf graphics cards in the SGI O2 under Linux. The O2 is equipped with a single PCI slot for expansion, so physically installing a new graphics card is no problem. Unfortunately, graphics cards require special initialization code, stored in the card's ROM, to be run at boot time. Since the Radeon's initialization routine has to be able to execute on the processor architecture in the computer in which it's installed, different code is required for x86, PowerPC, PA-RISC, SPARC, and MIPS. Since there weren't any PCI Radeon's made for MIPS powered workstations, surely ten years later, a modern Radeon would never work in an old SGI workstation...