Re: [Gnewsense-dev] [Dev] Loongson 3A hardware

[Michał Masłowski]

> This is a preliminary consultation about your potential interest in the
> porting of a free distribution like GNewSense [1] or Parabola [2] to the
> Loongson 3A hardware [3, 4]. This project would be inspired by some
> prior porting projects, on similar hardware, as the Yeeloong laptop
> [e.g. 5, 6, 7, 8]. Lemote [9], who helped on the GnewSenseToMips
> project, donating hardware and providing code and documentation, is
> willing to help again this new project with hardware & support (see
> forwarded message).

A Parabola port would have at least these problems:

- there is no English documentation for the CPU, none of our developers
  know Chinese

- some other machines with Radeon GPUs have no kernel modesetting
  support (or other important features like suspend and resume) without
  sourceless microcode that we won't provide, we don't know if the chip
  used is affected by this (all Radeons provide no acceleration without
  related microcode, this probably won't be worse than with the GPU of
  the 2F YeeLoong; another issue is that many of our users choose
  YeeLoongs for lack of nonfree VGA BIOS while the 3A machines have one)

It would most probably require more time from the developers, although
this can be solved by us.  Is translation of the documentation planned
(or available, maybe I haven't searched for it well) or are the Radeon
issues better with this chip than usually?

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