Old Vintage Computing Research: Working around dragons with the Lemote Yeeloong laptop and OpenBSD
A detailed hands-on exploration of the Lemote Yeeloong, a Chinese MIPS64-based netbook famous for being Richard Stallman's laptop of choice due to its fully libre software stack. Covers the history of the Loongson/Godson processor family from its origins at the Chinese Academy of Sciences through successive chip generations, the laptop's hardware internals including its cooling system quirks, and a thorough walkthrough of installing OpenBSD on the machine. Key technical challenges include working around two serious Loongson-2F hardware errata involving branch misprediction bugs that caused kernel panics, the PMON bootloader's limitations, lack of binary packages for mips64el, and workarounds needed to boot OpenBSD from an SD card while keeping existing Debian on the internal SSD.