Category: Loongson

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments on Linux 4.12 Release – Main Changes, ARM & MIPS Architectures

Linux 4.12 Release – Main Changes, ARM & MIPS Architectures

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 4.12: Things were quite calm this week, so I really didn’t have any real reason to delay the 4.12 release. As mentioned over the various rc announcements, 4.12 is one of the bigger releases historically, and I think only 4.9 ends up having had more commits. And 4.9 was big at least partly because Greg announced it was an LTS kernel. But 4.12 is just plain big. There’s also nothing particularly odd going on in the tree – it’s all just normal development, just more of it that usual. The shortlog below is obviously just the minor changes since rc7 – the whole 4.12 shortlog is much too large to post. In the diff department, 4.12 is also very big, although the reason there isn’t just that there’s a lot of development, we have the added bulk of a lot of new  header files […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments on Linux 4.11 Release – Main Changes, ARM & MIPS Architecture

Linux 4.11 Release – Main Changes, ARM & MIPS Architecture

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 4.11: So after that extra week with an rc8, things were pretty calm, and I’m much happier releasing a final 4.11 now. We still had various smaller fixes the last week, but nothing that made me go “hmm..”. Shortlog appended for people who want to peruse the details, but it’s a mix all over, with about half being drivers (networking dominates, but some sound fixlets too), with the rest being some arch updates, generic networking, and filesystem (nfs[d]) fixes. But it’s all really small, which is what I like to see the last week of the release cycle. And with this, the merge window is obviously open. I already have two pull request for 4.12 in my inbox, I expect that overnight I’ll get a lot more. Linux 4.10 added Virtual GPU support, perf c2c’ tool, improved writeback management, a faster initial WiFi connection […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments on Linux 4.9 Release – Main Changes, ARM and MIPS Architectures

Linux 4.9 Release – Main Changes, ARM and MIPS Architectures

Linus Torvalds released Linux 4.9 on Sunday: So Linux 4.9 is out, and the merge window for 4.10 is thus open. With the extra week for 4.9, the timing for the merge window is obviously a bit awkward, and it technically closes in two weeks on Christmas Day. But that is a pure technicality, because I will certainly stop pulling on the 23rd at the latest, and if I get roped into Xmas food prep, even that date might be questionable. I could extend the merge window rather than cut it short, but I’m not going to. I suspect we all want a nice calm winter break, so if your stuff isn’t ready to be merged early, the solution is to just not merge it yet at all, and wait for 4.11. Just so you all know (I already bcc’d the main merge window suspects in a separate mailing last […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments on Loongson Introduces MIPS64 3A2000 & 3B2000 Processors Based on GS464E Architecture

Loongson Introduces MIPS64 3A2000 & 3B2000 Processors Based on GS464E Architecture

Loongson recently unveiled two new quad core processors Loongson-3A2000 & Loongson-3B2000 targeting respectively consumer electronics and server, and on the company’s new GS464E architecture using MIPS64 cores. Both processors are 4-way superscalar processors built on a 9-stage, super-pipelined architecture with in-order execution units, two floating-point units, a memory management unit, and a crossbar interconnect. According to Imagination Technology, Chinese media reported that 3A2000 CPU was designed at high-performance consumer electronics products such as desktop computers and laptops, 64-bit embedded and DSP applications, and network routers, while 3B2000 will be used in 8 to 16 core server systems, meaning there would be 2 to 4 quad core processors in these servers. I could not find anything about the new processors on Loongson product page, but a white paper describes GS464E architecture in details. Unfortunately, the document is entirely in Chinese, except the abstract and some charts and tables: Loongson GS464E is […]