Loong64 is now an official Debian architecture [LWN.net]

John Paul Adrian Glaubitz has announced that loong64 is now an official architecture for Debian, and will be part of the Debian 14 ("forky") release "if everything goes along as planned". This is a bit more than two years after the initial bootstrap of the architecture.

So far, we have manually built and imported an initial set of 112 packages with the help of the packages in Debian Ports. This was enough to create an initial chroot and set up the first buildd which is now churning through the build queue. Over night, the currently single buildd instance already built and uploaded 300 new packages.

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It is a Chinese MIPS-based Arch

Posted Dec 23, 2025 11:38 UTC (Tue) by gmatht (subscriber, #58961) [Link] (5 responses)

I wasn't sure what Loong64 was. Apparently it is a Chinese government approved MIPS-based Arch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson

It is a Chinese MIPS-based Arch

Posted Dec 23, 2025 12:00 UTC (Tue) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (4 responses)

Yes it is very similar to mips r6, except for some reason they use different asm syntax for operand.
(eg daddu became add.d) so one have to modify existing mips64 asm code.
Probably the motivation is that mips r6 was abandoned in favor of risc-v but China has invested too much on mips64 (instead of arm) to switch.

Debian has a long history of supporting MIPS (mips, mipsel, mipsel64) so why not.

It is a Chinese MIPS-based Arch

Posted Dec 23, 2025 20:11 UTC (Tue) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link]

> eg daddu became add.d

This syntax looks like what OpenRISC uses and LoongArch (perhaps along with RISC-V) appears to target the same niche nowadays.

It is a Chinese MIPS-based Arch

Posted Dec 24, 2025 6:49 UTC (Wed) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link]

Debian just threw out all MIPS support, though :(

It is a Chinese MIPS-based Arch

Posted Dec 26, 2025 11:58 UTC (Fri) by justincormack (subscriber, #70439) [Link]

re "China has invested too much on mips64 (instead of arm) to switch" - this doesn't seem uniform across different Chinese companies, and loong still seems fairly niche there as far as I can make out from talking to people. Huawei are still all in on Arm, although they no longer have access to more recent Arm versions so they are continuing to develop the ones they had licenses for. Risc-V is also being developed elsewhere.

It is a Chinese MIPS-based Arch

Posted Jan 2, 2026 12:33 UTC (Fri) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link]

Originally Loongson started with MIPS, but Loongarch is a different, although similar instruction set (just as Alpha and RISC-V also have similarities with MIPS). Not just the mnemonics are different, but also the encodings (otherwise one could just reactivate the Debian MIPS port for Loongarch. E.g., Loongarch "add.d r1, r1, r1" encodes to 0x108421, while MIPS "daddu r1, r1, r1" encodes to 0x21082D.

One interesting aspect is that many instruction sets with 32-bit and 64-bit variants define the regular add from the 32-bit architecture to work on 64-bit values in the 64-bit variant (e.g., SPARC, Power, RISC-V). Some (RISC-V) define a 32-bit variant that sign- or zero-extends the low 32 bits of the result. MIPS instead defines the regular addu from MIPS-I (32-bit) as the sign-extending variant and defines a 64-bit daddu in MIPS64; Loongarch apparently follows MIPS in that decision.

Concerning "Chinese architectures", as another poster wrote, there is quite a bit of diversity in the architectures used by Chinese companies, including those that are considered to be close to the government by the USA.

Debian port creation docs

Posted Dec 25, 2025 2:55 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

The early steps of the Loongson folks at creating a LoongArch port of Debian lead the Debian community to create some documentation about how to create ports the right way. The docs ended up being fairly comprehensive, and hopefully will guide new and old ports to improve their status within Debian and the wider FOSS community.

https://wiki.debian.org/PortsDocs/New