[Dev] Loongson 3A hardware

[Samy Boutayeb]

> A Parabola port would have at least these problems:
> 
> - there is no English documentation for the CPU, none of our developers
>   know Chinese
> 
See [1] where one can find some eventually usefull infos about the cpu
(the actual one is named "3A" and should be followed by an upgrade named
"3B".
As for the machines using this 3A cpu, I am aware of:
- a laptop [2] AKA "Librenote", according to [3],
- a desktop [4], and 
- a server [5].
Another potentially interesting reference seems to be in [6].
Unfortunately, the decompressing of the "linux-3A-notebook.tgz" archive
ends with an "gzip: stdin: unexpectec end of file" message.

> - some other machines with Radeon GPUs have no kernel modesetting
>   support (or other important features like suspend and resume) without
>   sourceless microcode that we won't provide, we don't know if the chip
>   used is affected by this (all Radeons provide no acceleration without
>   related microcode, this probably won't be worse than with the GPU of
>   the 2F YeeLoong; another issue is that many of our users choose
>   YeeLoongs for lack of nonfree VGA BIOS while the 3A machines have one)
> 
> It would most probably require more time from the developers, although
> this can be solved by us.  Is translation of the documentation planned
> (or available, maybe I haven't searched for it well) or are the Radeon
> issues better with this chip than usually?

See [7] where one file is related to the radeonhd gpu. According to the
COPYING file inside the archive, this is under the xorg license from
freedesktop.org)

rgds
samy

[1] http://www.loongson.cn/dev/ftp/doc/01user manual/loongson3a/
[2] http://www.lemote.com/products/computer/yilong/312.html
[3]
www.ourlibreway.org/2011/11/13/lemote-company-8133-librenote-notebook/
[4] http://www.lemote.com/products/computer/fulong/348.html 
[5] http://www.lemote.com/products/computer/hongri/346.html 
[6] http://www.loongson.cn/dev/ftp/os/linux3Anotebook.tgz 
[7] http://www.loongson.cn/dev/ftp/3aXorg/