Loongson Adds LoongArch Support To LibreOffice
Following GCC 12 introducing LoongArch support earlier this year, Linux 5.19 adding the initial LoongArch port, and Glibc 2.36 adding LoongArch, LibreOffice is now the latest high-profile open-source project adding support for this Chinese processor ISA that started out derived from MIPS64.
Loongson as the company behind LoongArch contributed the native support for running the LibreOffice open-source office suite on LoongArch 64-bit hardware.
Related: Initial Experiments with the Loongson Pi 2K
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Debian developer Jonathan Carter was recently given a MIPS64-based motherboard which he ran through its paces. The board has a Loongson processor which is intended for both general purpose and embedded processing.
The reason why I wanted this board is that I don't have access to any MIPS64 hardware whatsoever, and it can be really useful for getting Calamares to run properly on MIPS64 on Debian. Calamares itself builds fine on this platform, but calamares-settings-debian will only work on amd64 and i386 right now (where it will either install grub-efi or grub-pc depending in which mode you booted, otherwise it will crash during installation). I already have lots of plans for the Bullseye release cycle (and even for Calamares specifically), so I'm not sure if I'll get there but I'd like to get support for mips64 and arm64 into calamares-settings-debian for the bullseye release. I think it's mostly just a case of detecting the platforms properly and installing/configuring the right bootloaders. Hopefully it's that simple.
In the meantime, I decided to get to know this machine a bit better. I'm curious how it could be useful to me otherwise. All its expansion ports definitely seems interesting. First I plugged it into my power meter to check what power consumption looks like. According to this, it typically uses between 7.5W and 9W and about 8.5W on average.
The Loongson processors are developed at the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in China in conjunction with the BLX IC Design Corporation, also in China.
Earlier on SN:
Is Low-Priced Computing Stuck With an ARM/x86 Duopoly? (2019)
MIPS CPU Architecture to Become Open Source Hardware in 2019 (2018)
Linux-Based, MIPS-Powered Russian All-in-One PC Launched (2016)
Loongson processors may get their own export restrictions:
The Chinese government has reportedly banned exports of Loongson CPUs based on the LoongArch microarchitecture to Russia and other countries, citing the strategic importance of these processors that are used by the country's military. For some Russian companies, Loongson chips could have become an alternative to x86 processors from AMD and Intel if partners of these two companies cease to ship these CPUs to Russia via other countries.
Sources close to the Russian Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media as well sources with knowledge of the local high-tech industry told Kommersant business daily that the Chinese government has banned exports of Loongson processors featuring the LoongArch microarchitecture to other countries. This is not going to have an immediate impact on the local market, but it could leave Russia without alternatives to processors from AMD and Intel.
[...] Kommersant admits that the Chinese government and Loongson have not yet formally put restrictions on exports of LoongArch-based CPUs. At present, it is still possible to get Loongson LS3A5000-based systems and motherboards from AliExpress, but these parts are rather expensive. Given that the performance of Loongson CPUs is significantly lower compared to processors from AMD and Intel, it's hard to expect these products will get any traction anywhere except China.
Previously: Loongson Adds LoongArch Support To LibreOffice
(Score: 2) by Rich on Monday August 15 2022, @03:02PM (4 children)
It shouldn't be hard to compile a word-processor-plus extras package that already runs on a wild variety of platforms, BUT back in the day, Sun forced Java to be included somehow, to push that to annoy Microsoft. (Microsoft in the meantime seem to have a solid response up by corrup.. er... supporting the people doing LibreOffice's user interface).
So the Chinese have to confront that Java issue. I had a look and found a repo at https://github.com/loongarch64 [github.com] which has the JDK. Among the "hotspot" architectures, there's nothing "loong" or even MIPS. Looks like they either have a feature reduced LO build so far, or one with a non-native-compiling Java. However, there are commits in the loong branch on aarch64, maybe they want to take the route of getting everything they need into there first and then switch over to their MIPS, sort of incrementally?! (I didn't dig very deep)
(Score: 1) by Acabatag on Monday August 15 2022, @04:18PM (1 child)
LibreOffice is already in the pkgsrc collection at NetBSD. I find it hard to believe there isn't somebody working on a NetBSD port to this new arch.
Searching, I find there is already a NetBSD port at this page [netbsd.org].
Announcing the port of OO this way is a little peculiar. Isn't the software portable enough to just plug into the existing freenix APIs?
(Score: 2, Informative) by millert on Monday August 15 2022, @07:26PM
That NetBSD port is for the old Loongson machines that use MIPS64. This article is about the newer LoongArch which is more like a fork of the MIPS64 ISA. They are not the same (yes, this is confusing).
(Score: 2) by mth on Monday August 15 2022, @04:20PM
The system requirements [libreoffice.org] page states "For certain features of the software - but not most - Java is required. Java is notably required for Base."
So it seems that there will be functionality missing if you don't have Java, but LibreOffice will work without it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RamiK on Monday August 15 2022, @09:36PM
The submission's reviewer commented on the phoronix discussion [phoronix.com] saying that the C++ bits were to support some COM-like components ABIs that go back to staroffice.
Anyhow, loongarch64 support was added to the jna in late May: https://github.com/java-native-access/jna/pull/1440 [github.com]
Also, it looks like they've opened the .NET pull request in late 2021: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/59561 [github.com]
Anyhow, in case you're not keeping up, the background for all this coverage is that they went public: https://technode.com/2022/06/24/chinese-chip-maker-loongson-technology-goes-public-in-shanghai/ [technode.com]
So, the hardware over at aliexpress [aliexpress.com] is something you can order though the weeks olds benchmarks listed at openbenchmarking.org should probably be taken with more than a few grains of salt.
Btw, the news coverage also mentioned they have an MCU for automobile and a bridge+gpu for their boards: https://technode.com/2022/08/05/loongson-produces-its-first-mcu-chip-for-cars/ [technode.com]
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