Running OpenBSD on the Lemote Yeeloong, and the story of China's Godson MIPS chip

A retrocomputing enthusiast documents getting OpenBSD running on a Lemote Yeeloong netbook — the first 64-bit MIPS laptop in their collection — while deliberately taking the hard road by booting from the SD card slot and compiling a browser from source. The hardware hacking is really a hook for the more interesting subject: why a Chinese-designed MIPS derivative ended up in the machine at all.

The bulk of the piece traces the lineage of the Loongson (龙芯, marketed as ‘Godson’) processor back to China’s 863 Program, the national high-tech R&D initiative Deng Xiaoping greenlit in 1986 to reduce dependence on foreign technology after watching SDI-era science funding pour into the US, USSR, Japan, and Europe. Despite that push, ARM and Intel dominated the Chinese market through the 1990s, and a genuinely competitive homegrown CPU took decades. In 2001, the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, led by Hu Weiwu, began building one — choosing the well-understood, largely unencumbered 32-bit MIPS II ISA, but dropping the still-patented unaligned load/store instructions to keep the IP defensible.

The result, Godson-1, launched in 2002 via the fabless joint venture BLX: four million transistors on a 180nm SMIC process, a seven-stage out-of-order pipeline at up to 266MHz under a watt, with an early no-execute bit for buffer-overflow mitigation. Performance roughly matched a five-year-old SGI O2, but it was real silicon running real code. MIPS Technologies was unhappy that BLX billed the chip as ‘MIPS-like’ without any license to the ISA or brand — a tension that didn’t stop AMD from opening a joint Beijing development center with BLX in late 2003. The article stands as both a hands-on OS install log and a well-sourced (favoring Chinese primary sources) history of China’s drive toward semiconductor self-sufficiency.