Ariadne Conill

A long time free software contributor, Ariadne was one of the original developers of Alpine Linux, contributing the x86_64 port in the late 2000s. Since then, she has contributed to additional Alpine ports, as well as maintenance of core Alpine system utilities including apk-tools, ifupdown-ng, libucontext and pkgconf. Professionally, she is one of the founders of Edera, a Kubernetes security company. She is also the creator of the Wolfi GNU/Linux distribution which is growing in popularity in the containers space, powering the commercial Chainguard Images product.


Website URL

https://ariadne.space/


Session

11-08
17:00
50min
Alpine on LoongArch, the Chinese sovereign ISA
Ariadne Conill

Due to an ongoing trade war between the west and China, the Chinese desired to create their own sovereign CPU design and ISA -- enter LoongArch to fill that niche. Accordingly, Loongson have ported several Linux distributions to the 64-bit variant of loongarch, known as loongarch64.

As both an Alpine developer who wants to have hardware for every port that Alpine runs on, and somewhat of a historian of computing, I was naturally intrigued in both the Alpine loongarch64 port as well as the hardware, which can be best described as MIPS64r6 but with some RISC-V characteristics.

Systems and Platforms
334