LoongArch Promoted To Being An Official Architecture For Debian 14

Two years and a few months after LoongArch 64-bit "Loong64" was added to Debian Ports, it's now been promoted to being an official architecture for Debian Linux.

LoongArch 64-bit is now an official architecture of Debian and will be part of the next Debian 14 "Forky" release. The announcement came down today that Loong64 is now an official architecture for Debian:

"I am happy to announce that a little more than two years after the initial bootstrap in Debian Ports, loong64 has become an official architecture in Debian and will therefore be part of the upcoming Debian 14 ("forky") release if everything goes along as planned.

So far, we have manually built and imported an initial set of 112 packages with the help of the packages in Debian Ports. This was enough to create an initial chroot and set up the first buildd which is now churning through the build queue. Over night, the currently single buildd instance already built and uploaded 300 new packages.

It is expected that this initial bootstrap will take about a week depending on whether additional buildd instances will be added later the next days which would increase the build throughput."

LoongArch is the CPU architecture developed by Loongson in China and inspired by MIPS and RISC-V. Coincidentally this week I also received word about receiving some LoongArch community hardware samples soon for review/benchmarking, so hopefully soon there will finally be some LoongArch benchmarks appearing on Phoronix.

Debian 14 "Forky" with official LoongArch support and many other new features should be out in 2027.