What firmware does Loongson hardware use?

[bkeys]

I'm looking at buying this hardware:
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256809202705147.html
I want to know what boot firmware this uses and if it's open source (can I see the source code repo)? Looking at videos it looks like it's at least heavily based on edk2?

[xen0n]

For the record: this is the ASUS XC-LS3A6M, for those unable to get through the login wall.

The board's firmware is released by ASUS, not Loongson, so that's why you won't see the model in this repo, but the ASUS support channel is not public either. So it's hard to obtain tech support or updates. However many people actually do (including me) because they have connections to the Loongson/ASUS firmware team, so you may be able to if you join the right user group (e.g. the unofficial Telegram group).

According to my own experience (I own 4 or 5 of these boards), about the only problem you'll encounter regarding the firmware is compatibility with recent AMD dGPU models (released in the last 2~3 years), due to those cards shipping x86_64 option ROM for initializing self, which this board's firmware cannot handle. Older GPUs work fine because they ship plain old x86 init code, so do more recent Loongson boards because their firmware has MultiArchUefiPkg integrated, but unfortunately not this board ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Another minor headache is that the board's NIC is the Motorcomm YT6801, whose Linux support is not upstream yet. However a mainline driver is already in the works, so hopefully this wouldn't be a problem shortly after.

[bkeys]

I'm interested in running Loongson hardware but I strongly prefer to have open source boot firmware. Is it possible to get the source code for this firmware from the ASUS team? Is there any kind of mainline edk2 support? If I want to run 3a6000 hardware with open firmware what models do you recommend?

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805994810448.html
What about this hardware? He doesn't give a model number but it looks similar to the ones in the repo.
I'd like to have a board with as much open firmware as possible and the best performance I want to use it as my main workstation. Is there a better place than aliexpress to buy this hardware?

[kilaterlee]

I'm interested in running Loongson hardware but I strongly prefer to have open source boot firmware. Is it possible to get the source code for this firmware from the ASUS team? Is there any kind of mainline edk2 support? If I want to run 3a6000 hardware with open firmware what models do you recommend?

Sorry, we currently have no plans to release the FW code for any motherboards currently on sale.

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805994810448.html What about this hardware? He doesn't give a model number but it looks similar to the ones in the repo. I'd like to have a board with as much open firmware as possible and the best performance I want to use it as my main workstation. Is there a better place than aliexpress to buy this hardware?

This HW is a 3A6000 CRB, model XA61200, you can get the last version FW from the following link: https://github.com/loongson/Firmware/tree/main/6000Series/PC/XA61200, we will update from it time to time.

[xen0n]

I read through the chat of the telegram group (the admin hasn't approved me to be on there yet). Since it is edk2 based, perhaps this could be reverse engineered. I have a lot of embedded systems experience, but I have never had to do UEFI development. I know you guys probably have some NDA signed but do you think it's feasible for one man to do this? Did it take a lot of changes from mainline edk2? Can you point me to some hardware documents?

The only known obstacle to fully-open physical model firmware would be the early-init code blob, which makes use of undocumented CSRs and operates on undocumented HW bits. For example, the DDR controller is one of the most prominent parts without fully open documentation or init code, presumably for commercial reasons, yet it is vital for platform bring-up. I think the rest are already open. And for something interesting: the blob itself might be written in assembly, so disassembling it may be enough to reproducing 80% of it 😎 (Source: before LoongArch was even invented they used to have their previous-generation PMON firmware for MIPS Loongson models publicly available, and this code was pure assembly there. Assuming that non-microarchitecture things didn't change much during their arch transition, the present-time blob should change relatively little.)

Previously I have talked with the team about possibly minimizing this blob and exposing it through publicly documented and stable API (a bit like Intel FSP or AMD AGESA), so that third-parties could start doing firmware work for physical boards. The team basically agreed this is valuable, but I suppose they are lacking manpower to actually make this happen. IANAL but I personally would not expect Loongson to have problem with anyone reverse-engineering the code, rather they would probably happily base their work on battle-tested community code ;-)

Thank you for your interest in this architecture and best wishes!

[xry111]

For the Forever Pi (based on 2K0300) there's a uboot fork: https://github.com/chitao1234/u-boot-la-99pi-plus. The "libmemconfig.a" is the blob of which the source seems not available to be disclosed by even Loongson itself.

I know at least a guy is attempting reversing engineering it. But 2K0300 is just a "high-end MCU" and it's not so similar to 3A6000.