A few weeks ago we told you about RISC-V. Today: LoongArch.
Another architecture, you ask? Yes. Grab a coffee, and let me tell you why.
IPFire is now available for yet another architecture. LoongArch joins x86, ARM and RISC-V as the fourth 64-bit architecture we support, and the second one we have added this year. Somewhere a build server just sighed.
A Big Thank You
None of this would have happened without our friends at the Loongson Hobbyists' Community, who gifted us the build hardware. We are an open-source project, and nobody was obliged to hand us a very nice computer. They did anyway, and it arrived super fast and completely uncomplicated, directly from China.
A porting project lives or dies by having real hardware to work on, and they gave us exactly that. Thank you, truly.
Meet the Machine
The machine is built around a Loongson 3A6000-HV processor on a Loongson XA61200 motherboard, and it is now the fastest machine in our build farm. It completes a full build of IPFire in just over two hours. For comparison, our RISC-V builds take about seven hours on a real board, and used to take 54 to 56 hours under emulation, which is the kind of number that makes you question your career choices.
This is no surprise. It is not yet another SBC, but a properly sized DTX board with a beefy processor and a big fan. It looks like a machine that came to work.
I have to be upfront about one thing: it lives in a data centre as a build system, so I have not been able to boot IPFire on it yet. In an emulated virtual machine, it boots just fine. Yes, I know, "it works in the VM" is the hardware equivalent of "it works on my machine". But it is a real milestone: the toolchain works, the packages build, and the result starts and runs.
But Why?
A milestone? With no hardware to run it on? I know what you are thinking: we are porting to a CPU that you cannot buy at your local shop. What is the point?
There are several good reasons.
It proves that our build is clean: Every new architecture is a stress test. If IPFire builds and runs on four of them, our toolchain and build system clearly do not depend on the quirks of one host architecture. That is also a security feature. If IPFire can be rebuilt independently on different machines, audits get easier and bugs get easier to reproduce.
It gives you choice: We want to be the opposite of vendor lock-in. When IPFire runs on x86, ARM, RISC-V and LoongArch, you are not tied to Intel, AMD or any single vendor's roadmap. You pick the hardware on your terms: best price, best availability, or the roadmap you trust. Researchers, governments and operators of critical infrastructure are actively looking to avoid depending on a single, dominant instruction set, and they deserve a good firewall, too.
It was the easiest port yet: Partly because we learned a lot from the earlier ones. Partly because LoongArch did its homework: support is upstream in the Linux kernel, GCC and the rest of the toolchain, and pretty much everywhere else it needs to be. This is not an architecture in its early days. It has arrived.
And no, we are not the only lunatics doing this. Debian is about to become available for LoongArch, too, so we are in good company.
Even if you never run LoongArch, you benefit. A resilient build and better-tested software make a better firewall on every architecture, including the one behind your shoe rack right now.
What's Next
Our goal is to grow IPFire's user base on non-x86 hardware. The software is here, so now we wait for the hardware to catch up. If you are a vendor building LoongArch, RISC-V or ARM hardware and would like to work with us, we would be happy to hear from you.
If you want to try it yourself, nightly images are available, and packages work as usual. Tell us what you find, and ask any questions, on the development mailing list.
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