Old Vintage Computing Research: Working around dragons with the Lemote Yeeloong laptop and OpenBSD
Saturday, June 27, 2026
Working around dragons with the Lemote Yeeloong laptop and OpenBSD
Behold: the Guru of GNU! (Photo by Habib Mhenni, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.)
True enlightment only comes from a truly free computing experience, probably! And while there is no nerd who lacks an opinion on Richard Stallman personally, likewise let none claim he does not practice what he preaches. Why, the very laptop in front of him was selected deliberately because it can operate with no binary blobs and no firmware you couldn't examine or replace with your own, and runs his choice of fully libre operating systems. The fact it has a Chinese MIPS64 derivative in it was undoubtedly just more compound on the heat spreader.
Now, in my case, the fact that it is a MIPS-family system meant I certainly needed one in my unusual laptop collection. And since it can run OpenBSD ...
... it seemed like a good way to get nerdsniped in two ways by one computer: since I mostly run NetBSD as my BSD and server operating system of choice, I figured this was also a good way to learn OpenBSD on a highly portable netbook using an unusual platform. As usual, of course, the whole shooting match turned out to be a much longer journey than I'd anticipated, and my typical insistence on deviating from the beaten path (such as forcing it to run from the SD card slot and trying to build a browser from source) made it more so. But before we embark upon it, let's talk about why there's a Chinese MIPS derivative in this thing in the first place.
This is, of course, not the first MIPS laptop we've played with; a perennially popular article is on IBM's MIPS not-a-ThinkPad, and MIPS was also used for a couple of our Sun Ray laptops, including one you can easily get root on. But it is the first 64-bit MIPS laptop we've had here at Floodgap Orbiting HQ and certainly the smallest, and the provenance of its processor gets even more interesting. I should mention that while later chips in the series are relatively well-documented in English, its earlier entries are largely only discussed in Standard Chinese, and my ability to translate Chinese is even worse than my capacity for Japanese. These early chips are where we'll find the "why," however, so I'll do my best. Where there is disagreement between Chinese primary sources and Western secondary reporting (and there are many discrepancies), for obvious reasons I have generally favoured the former's accounts. Please forgive any inaccuracies that result. 谢谢.
The People's Republic of China had long prioritised indigenous technology as a means of securing independence from foreign interests, though early efforts in electronics primarily concentrated on defense. This dramatically changed after the Chinese government realized it was being left behind by new developments in the 1980s such as the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative, which apart from zapping nukes in the sky pumped substantial funding through the SDI Organization into basic science research, and parallel similar efforts in the Soviet Union, Japan and Europe. Paramount leader Deng Xiaoping responded with the 863 Program, named for the date of its establishment in March 1986, when it was officially proposed to the Chinese government by multiple scientists and engineers with his explicit endorsement. "The matter must be decided quickly without delay," he allegedly scribbled on the report. Officially dubbed the National High Technology Research and Development Program (国家高技术研究发展计划), the 863 Program focused on general science and technology applications in multiple domains, including biotech, space, lasers, automation, energy, new materials and information technology, with a fifteen-year timeframe. It became state policy as part of the Seventh Five-Year Plan and subsequent Five-Year Plans thereafter, and by 1988 was the country's premier industrial research and development initiative.
Despite leadership's strong interest in semiconductors, foreign processor designs nevertheless dominated in China throughout the 1990s; the lack of cutting-edge fabrication and design capacity made early industry leads insurmountable, and by the beginning of the second millenium established players like ARM and Intel held commanding market shares on the mainland as well. As a result, although more limited native microprocessor designs and clones had previously existed, a Chinese-developed CPU that was in any sense competitive with market leaders took decades to emerge. In 2001 the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) under chief architect Hu Weiwu began work on a new higher-performance chip as their own attempt, funded by the Tenth Five-Year Plan and the continuation of the 863 Program, now transformed into a long-term R&D pipeline under Jiang Zemin.
Officially called 龙芯, which would usually be transliterated in Pinyin...