11-08, 17:00–17:50 (US/Pacific), 334
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.
This talk is about the journey of procuring a LoongArch machine and comparing it to ARM, RISC-V and x86 contemporaries. We will also discuss the historical context which led up to the creation of LoongArch, as well as demonstrate a live LoongArch system from boot into an Alpine environment with live benchmarking.
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.