Debian at Yeeloong (MIPS)

You can find a number of alternative solutions, which, like ARM, can be quite energy efficient, and suitable for the mobile sector. One bright example is the Yeeloong 8089B netbook from Lemote. It has 1 GB of installed RAM too, a 6.35 cm (2.5") HDD, but only of 160 GB. It features a Loongson 2F processor at 800MHZ. It was manufactured a few years earlier than the Nvidia Tegra2, so please don't expect any hardware acceleration because that has only appeared in the Loongson 2H (aka Godson2h). So, our testing is without hardware acceleration in mind. I can't wait to get my hands on the next-generation Yeeloong 8133, designed on the Loongson 3A.

loongson@debian:~$ time 7z b 7-Zip 9.04 beta Copyright (c) 1999-2009 Igor Pavlov 2009-05-30 p7zip Version 9.04 (locale=c,utf16=off,hugefiles=on,1 CPU) RAM size: RAM usage:

Dict real user sys

Compressing | Speed Usage R/U Rating | KB/S % MIPS MIPS | 1004 MB, # CPU hardware threads: 419 MB, # Benchmark threads: 22: 315 99 309 306 | 4989 99 454 450 23: 312 99 321 318 | 4937 99 455 452 24: 303 99 329 326 | 4880 99 457 452 25: 297 99 342 339 | 4839 99 459 455 ---------------------------------------------------------------Avr: 99 325 322 99 456 452 Tot: 99 391 387 4m38.692s 4m31.901s 0m3.776s loongson@debian:~$ mount /dev/hda1 on / type ext3 (rw,errors=remount-ro) 1 1

Decompressing Speed Usage R/U Rating

KB/S % MIPS MIPS

Compared with the Trimslice, this is slower. But remember, they are not contemporary. Also, the Nvidia Tegra2 has two virtual cores, while the Loongson2f has only one.

Next is the hard disk partition. It has one large ext3 root partition of 60 GB. The remaining space is reserved, but can be manually added and formatted as new partitions. loongson@debian:~$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/hda1 56G 53G 202M 100% / tmpfs 503M 0 503M 0% /lib/init/rw udev 10M 432K 9.6M 5% /dev tmpfs 503M 0 503M 0% /dev/shm tmpfs on /lib/init/rw type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,mode=0755) proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) udev on /dev type tmpfs (rw,mode=0755) tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev) devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=620) fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw) binfmt_misc on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)

This unit shipped with Debian Lenny by default. Three years have passed, so I decided to update it to Debian Squeeze. The operation requires two steps: a package list update and upgrade option, after editing repo information to add new 'Squeeze' lines into /etc/apt/sources.list, and comment out old ones: ##deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib nonfree deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib nonfree

Now, let’s run aptitude update && aptitude safe-upgrade. Once the update is done, it's worth doing a reboot.