MIPS64

In my article about running OpenBSD/loongson on the Lemote Yeeloong back in 2016, I mentioned looking for a Fuloong. All hope seemed lost until the Summer of 2017, when a fellow OpenBSD developer was contacted by a generous user (Thanks again, Lars!) offering to donate two Lemote Fuloong machines, and I was lucky enough to get one of those units. This machine uses the same CPU as the Yeeloong, a Loongson 2F which is a single-core MIPS-III 64-bit processor running at 800/900 MHz....

NetBSD-current now has pre-built octeon bootable images (which will appear in NetBSD 10.0) for the evbmips port, so I decided to finally give it a try. I’ve been happily running OpenBSD/octeon on my EdgeRouter Lite for a few years now, and have previously published some notes including more detail about the CPU. Contrary to the OpenBSD/octeon port which is very stable and runs SMP kernels, things are a little less polished on the NetBSD side for this platform....

I’ve had the EdgeRouter Lite from Ubiquiti since a little more than a year now, and it’s a nice and affordable little fanless device to run OpenBSD/octeon on. The CPU on this machine is a dual-core Cavium Octeon CN50xx (MIPS64 ISA) which can run in both BE and LE modes. OpenBSD runs in big-endian mode on this architecture. On the minus side, there is no internal clock and no FPU....

After hunting for Loongson based hardware for the first half of 2015, I was finally able to find an used Yeeloong in July, in very good condition. Upon receiving the parcel, the first thing I did was to install OpenBSD on this exquisitely exotic machine. For more information regarding the OpenBSD/loongson port and how it came to be, the OpenBSD Journal has a nice story on the topic. I have been using my Yeeloong more and more during the last few months, notably to attempt building LLVM on this machine....

I’ve been attempting to build LLVM on the Lemote Yeeloong for some time now, starting with LLVM 3.7.1. Sadly, the port doesn’t build out of the box due to RAM constraints; the machine only has a 1GB RAM module, and while it’s easily accessible and removable, upgrading the RAM on this machine is borderline impossible, more on that in a later article. After a first full build fail, I decided to try the suggestions from pascal@ regarding LLVM on PowerPC, and started disabling additional architecture support first, then the static analyzer....