Fuloong 2f

Machine: Lemote Fuloong 2f.
See: Lemote Website

10.07.2009: Some results from nbench (an old benchmark), it's always the same machine:

17.07.2009: Some Comments regarding common Lemote (mis-)informations:

Regarding to Lemote the Fuloong needs 10W, some sources allude 17W. Mine needs ~20W! With Powersavings on I can get it down to a minimum of 16W at least (clocked to 200MHz, Patched Kernel with Loongson Wait Instructions, idle, no load). (btw: the original Rays and Debian Systems still do not support loongsons power management)
The CPU (loongson 2f) has a relatively big heatsink on it (compared to other mips models I know (which do not need any heat sink at all at 400MHz!)) nevertheless it needs an active FAN. btw:
It's noisy. There's some Micro Fan/Blower inside it which runs at full speed all the time. There's no way to slow it down, but never mind, the fan is needed because of the heat the fuloong produces.
"The total consumption of the component is only 10 watt which ensures quiet operation." (http://www.lemote.com/english/fuloong.html): Seems a lie for me. 10 Watt maybe is the CPU by it's own. The full System is everything but not "quiet". It's noisier than my old AMD Opteron System.
The nbench results in N32-Mode are on par with a P4 at same clock speed. But nbench is not accurate. i.e. the Intel Atom seems to be much faster than a 1GHz P3, which is _not_ the case.
I didn't find any N32 loongson optimized mips Linux System with X included. Debian and Rays are O32 for now which means they are 20-30% slower than the optimum. But it seems they run stable. No (unprovoked) crash for now :-)

For now (17.Jul.2009) I am cross compiling (x86->mips) a Loongson/N32-optimized Gentoo via some Cross compiling environment. There are many Packages which have to be hand tuned. This will take a while.

18.Jul.2009: Gave up cross compiling in favour of distcc. I didn't get it, with cross compiling so many packages fail. Maybe some day I build my crossdev from scratch...

To build all gentoo world packages to binary packages, not building already existing ones:
cd /var/db/pkg
for i in */*; do echo $i; done | while read package; do test -f /usr/portage/packages/$package.tbz2 || nice -n 19 quickpkg --include-config=y =$package; done

07.Sep.2009: My Fuloong now is fully passive cooled :-) One 450g eCu (copper) block transfers the heat of the loongson CPU and the SIS 315PRO / XGI Volari V2 GPU to the Aluminium Case. After compiling the whole morning, Copper Temp is ~37°C and Case Temp is ~32°C. Pictures will follow...
btw: One of the actively cooled high-energy Chips is labeled XGI Volari V2. I think this is the PCI id 3030:3030 / SiS 312PRO, i.e. the GPU: This GPU consumes much power, there's 32MB dedicated VRAM, but there's no 3D driver. There's only a closed Source 3D driver for Windows. But this is a MIPS machine not able to run Windows. WTF the Lemote developers thought while designing the fuloong 2F? Any Ideas?

29.11.2012: The Fuloong is now running as my home server for more than 2 Years. And it's running fine!
I'm using Linux VServer (Patched the Kernel by my own). Several Virtual Machines for miscellaneous functions: One for the Groupware (Kolab, Postfix, Horde, Squirrelmail, Cyrus Imap, etc.). One for a mumble server and its web interface. One for my internal file server.
Maybe slower than a big Opteron or Xeon system, but for me it's ok.

Fuloong 2f

to be continued