Consider to add loong64 support

[probonopd]

loong64 might become popular, particular in China. So supporting it would be welcome in principle, even though I currently have no hardware to test it with.

@msojocs, I am hesitant to build anything that I cannot test. Would a "Loongson 2K1000LA" development board be good to test this?

Testing using qemu could be a potential fallback.

References

• Bump alpine from 3.20 to 3.21 in /scripts/docker #109
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson
• feat: add loong64 support #33
• feat: add loong64 support appimagetool#53

[msojocs]

According to the official documentation, the "2K1000LA processor utilizes the LoongArch instruction set (Dragon Architecture)," but since I couldn't find any English documents, it might not be a good choice. (Sorry, I don't know much about this.)

Chinese introduction with manual

English introduction without manual

[probonopd]

Can you recommend an inexpensive device to test this with?

[msojocs]

Sorry, I don't know much about Loongson hardware.

I am using qemu.

[xen0n]

As a community LoongArch porter and upstream maintainer of various projects' LoongArch ports, I can say QEMU linux-user emulation should be enough for test-driving LoongArch, as long as you don't depend on super privileged kernel interfaces, or hard-to-emulate intricate behavior like heavy lock-free parallelism. That said, we have been using QEMU all the time ourselves for developing and cross-building packages on our non-LoongArch rigs, so problems should be rare and someone from Loongson would fix any bug reported upstream.

As for real hardware to purchase, outside of China we generally recommend the 3A6000+7A2000 boards on AliExpress. The XA61200 model in particular is officially supported by Loongson, with regular firmware updates, and many community members find its desktop performance to be good with an AMD GPU. You'll have Alpine, Debian, Gentoo stage3 and various distros to choose from.

Hope this helps and thanks for your efforts on AppImage! (I personally use AppImage-packed apps from time to time and it certainly helps immensely.)

[probonopd]

Hi @xen0n. Thank you for your detailed answer. And thanks for recommending these boards. However, these are outside of my spending limits at the moment. Do you know how popular devices with the Loongson architecture currently are in China for desktop (not server) use?

[xen0n]

Hi @xen0n. Thank you for your detailed answer. And thanks for recommending these boards. However, these are outside of my spending limits at the moment.

Would remote access to real hardware be sufficient for testing purposes? If so, I can notify the right people in Loongson to hopefully arrange for an account. The GCC Compile Farm also has LoongArch machines already, with Debian sid.

Do you know how popular devices with the Loongson architecture currently are in China for desktop (not server) use?

Hmm, based on my experience and some public information (that I read a long time ago), the total number could be several thousands already. On Baidu Tieba (kinda similar to Reddit) I can see a few parents buying LoongArch computer so they know their children wouldn't be able to play most games (without first learning how to set up emulation, or fixing bugs themselves, heh), and also a design firm doing CAD on LoongArch.

So, while I'm certainly biased to some extent, nevertheless it's probably 100010000s of them in active use right now, and the number is only going to increase in the next 35 years.

[xen0n]

Hmm, and BTW @sunhaiyong1978 and I noticed: the port would probably be best named "loongarch64" so as to match the Alpine Linux architecture name, as seems to be the case for other arch names.