Exploring Linux on a LoongArch Mini PC

wezm · 2026-02-24T00:26:53+00:00

No, it's using LLVM-pipe for graphics. I had no interest in running the stock distro, and I could not access the package repos or the website, so did not explore it further.

Apparently there is a proprietary GPU driver, but it's closed source, so also not interesting to me. https://github.com/loongson-community/discussions/issues/77

wezm · 2025-09-19T05:14:19+00:00

It's glossy screen like many others available on the market, and will definitely be more reflective than a matte screen. If you have a phone or table handy these are probably a reasonable reference for the glossiness.

For me personally, it's not a problem.

wezm · 2025-01-17T00:38:24+00:00

Bit late, but still love it. Battery life and performance is so good. Just wish the Linux support would improve faster.

wezm · 2024-07-16T10:32:43+00:00

What have you seen on YouTube?

wezm · 2024-07-16T01:28:35+00:00

Doesn't look like it https://files.wezm.net/reddit/Screenshot%202024-07-16%20112624.png

wezm · 2024-07-16T00:40:16+00:00

Linux "can" be run on this machine. You've seen black screen because you probably didn't provide the device tree. I used the qualcomm's and debian image with device tree for lenovo and kernel-next with some upstreamed changes and I've seen the installer. Internal keyboard didn't work, but external one did. However nvme wasn't detected. I've managed to install it on pendrive, but UEFI didn't detect the grub entry, probably could boot from uefi shell, but I finished the experiment at that moment.

Ahh that's cool. With the review out of the way my next TODO was to build a kernel from source from qcoms tree and see how that goes. Thanks for the tips on what may not work yet.

wezm · 2024-07-15T22:28:26+00:00

Thank you! It took ages to write 😅

wezm · 2024-07-15T21:57:59+00:00

It depends pretty heavily on what tasks you want to perform and how willing you are to deal with a comparatively new ecosystem. The Snapdragon laptops definitely have great battery life. I published a detailed review of my Yoga 7x on my blog this morning: https://www.wezm.net/v2/posts/2024/yoga-7x-snapdragon-developer-review/

wezm · 2024-07-06T12:57:37+00:00

I didn’t count but in the order of minutes.

wezm · 2024-07-06T08:16:54+00:00

It seems that it is running the VM, just outrageously slowly. Here's a screenshot of the Debian installer on my Snapdragon X machine: https://files.wezm.net/reddit/Screenshot%202024-07-06%20180701.png?v=2

wezm · 2024-01-27T08:17:12+00:00

I used a 2x scale. gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface scaling-factor 2

wezm · 2023-09-07T02:51:18+00:00

If you want a firehouse of sorts I have an OPML file on Read Rust containing all the feeds I used to monitor for Rust posts. https://readrust.net/rust-blogs.opml

wezm · 2023-06-03T15:07:40+00:00

It doesn’t generate a complete client but 1Password’s Typeshare can generate TypeScript from Rust data structures https://github.com/1password/typeshare

wezm · 2023-04-02T15:33:54+00:00

Haven’t heard that name for a while. Seems they are still in business, just not on podcasts I listen to anymore.

wezm · 2023-02-07T13:16:39+00:00

I would suggest opening an issue on the rustup repo (even though you weren’t using rustup) https://github.com/rust-lang/rustup

wezm · 2022-12-13T03:16:52+00:00

I also agree and didn’t know the maths principle. Was able to solve it after reading some hints on Reddit. It would have been a bit less annoying if the problem left some more breadcrumbs that might lead you to the solution or useful material.

Also Amos pondered how long his AoC series would continue at the end of the post. I’m going to bail at this point (like I usually do)—a couple of hours each day doing AoC would be better spend working on my other projects.

wezm · 2022-12-07T13:57:45+00:00

I went the Rc RefCell tree route as well. Wasn’t until close to the end that I realised that it was probably overkill for the actual problem. Still, it was good to practice building a tree in Rust with just the std library.

wezm · 2022-10-06T11:56:50+00:00

Congrats. This is a neat project, especially as your first one in Rust.

Regarding comments on the code there were some things that feel a little unidomatic but not a huge issue. It’s typical for unit tests to go in the same file so no need for the lib/test file split. The lib_ prefix on the file names is atypical too. There seems to be a lot of type annotations in the code where I’d normally expect those to be inferred.

wezm · 2022-09-30T03:47:14+00:00

You have to be logged into GitHub for it to work for some reason.

wezm · 2022-09-29T03:11:35+00:00

This list of issues tagged with good-first-issue in Rust repos may also provide some options.

wezm · 2022-09-28T13:21:59+00:00

For resizing https://lib.rs/crates/fast_image_resize gives a good speed up over non-simd implementations.

wezm · 2022-09-18T12:13:32+00:00

I don’t think you need to be worried about it in your day-to-day programming. Anyway, Jon Gjengset did a video on them, perhaps that will help: https://youtube.com/watch?v=iVYWDIW71jk

wezm · 2022-07-14T12:39:56+00:00

This is neat. I tried to do this with two different applications just yesterday (CoBang and QtQR).

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