Lemote YeeLoong 8101B with Loongson 2F CPU review

The Lemote YeeLoong is a small and free software-friendly laptop and one of the few available non-x86 (and non-ARM) laptops. (It’s sometimes called a ‘netbook’ or a ‘mini notebook’.)

As a user and contributor to a GNU/Linux distribution supporting this device, I’m often asked about it. The information published by the manufacturer and distro maintainers doesn’t reflect what could be seen by a user. This review is based on my experience using it and questions of free software supporters interested in this device.

The YeeLoong I have is 8101B with a 10.1 inch display. The 8089B model probably differs only in display size (8.9 inch), having the same internals. There are newer YeeLoongs with 2G or 3A CPUs being marketed, these are significantly different on most points discussed here. (This review probably won’t be helpful for review-writing classes, there are better resources for them available.)

Hardware

Case

One of the most common marketing claims is that the machine was built by Quanta and the case is of high quality. This seems more reliable than most qualitative opinions stated on the Lemote page.

Shiny lid, the user-visible part matte, the parts I use aren’t visibly shinier. No intrusive logos (the small model name near the screen helps typing it correctly). No scratches after more than two years of using. The display hinge works ok.

(My other laptop, an Asus F3U has many scratches on top and had once many parts changed after the display hinge broke. Despite being newer by about a year, the parts I touched are now much shinier. Completely different experience.)

CPU

Loongson 2F is a single core MIPS3-compatible 64-bit CPU with some custom ISA extensions (not all used in software).

There is a custom SIMD extension, similar to MMX although not well-supported by GCC and with different intrinsics. A Gentoo hacker used them to optimize an important graphics library and posted a great explanation of these issues.

There are easily worked around bugs which would hang the machine (still untrusted code can do it), they were a bigger problem before English documentation was made available.

There is no uploadable microcode, this is one of the reason why x86 systems probably won’t be as free as this one (even the free boot firmware implementation coreboot usually requires nonfree CPU microcode).

The manufacturer claims of buffer overflow protection, this probably refers to an NX bit. I don’t know if it’s used in software.

Video card

The video card is a SiliconMotion SMI712 which does not have any hardware 3D acceleration. The reason why I consider the machine not completely supported by free software is limited 2D or video acceleration in free GNU/Linux distros.

gNewSense metad uses the fbdev driver without support for resolution change or 2D acceleration. Parabola uses the siliconmotion driver with unoptimal support for these features (fbdev is available). Newer X server releases make XAA slower (this is very noticeable when using KDE), while EXA hangs the machine (not a new issue), so fbdev might be faster now. There are legendary drivers with xrandr support, I never used them.

Gentoo has patches making full-screen low quality YouTube videos playable (I used WatchVideo for this), they probably could be ported to other distros. There are ongoing discussions on a new SiliconMotion video driver on the X.Org development list, maybe this driver will improve this situation (it has xrandr support).

The VGA output has low colour quality, although I haven’t used such outputs on other machines for a longer time, when all my other machines can use DVI-D. The documentation of the chip claims dual head support at 16 bpp, I never used it successfully.

SMI712 has only 4 MiB of video RAM, using reasonable resolutions might need special X settings to fit in it.

Summing up, I believe the only good thing about this chip is no dependency on a nonfree VBIOS, system-provided microcode nor driver. Unfortunately, no other graphics chip used in laptops or desktop computers known to me has this feature.

Display

Despite all the driver problems, this machine is fast enough to read typical books in a PDF reader. The screen is matte, unlike my other laptop, so it’s useful even during summer days.

However, decreasing the backlight brightness results in a headache-causing flickering (a problem caused by the LED backlight design, probably occurring on other devices). Usually I can use it at full brightness, it’s a less noticeable issue when not using X.

Wi-Fi

There are reports of the Wi-Fi card not working, but I haven’t observed any problems with it. AP mode is not supported by the driver, I never wanted to use it since my other machine with a more powerful Atheros 802.11n card supports it.

The card supports 802.11b and 802.11g, not 802.11a despite what some reviews state.

Webcam

The webcam works with only some programs, depending on kernel version. I probably haven’t tried enough to configure it.

SD card reader

It works with both SD and SD HC cards. Somehow on Parabola reading from the SD card was needed before the partitions were found, so it didn’t work well with the GUIs for mounting storage.

Booting from SD cards is not supported.

Touchpad

There is no middle button and the layout of left and right buttons make simultaneous clicks impossible.

The device is of Sentelic, it doesn’t support absolute positioning in the driver (possibly due to patent issues). I had better experience with an ALPS touchpad supported by the xf86-input-synaptics driver.

There are various non-mainline drivers for Sentelic touchpads (e.g. for MSI Wind), maybe some of them would work with the one in the YeeLoong. I haven’t tried using them.

Fan

It’s loud. It’s too often running, although this might be partially fixed using thinkfan.

RAM

Only 1 GiB is supported by the CPU and boot firmware. The SO-DIMM can be changed, I haven’t found any need to do it.

Disk

The (probably too optimistic in general case) hdparm benchmark shows 20 MB/s transfer speed, even when I configured the driver to consider it being connected via an 80 wire cable (a Parabola hacker had similar results with an SSD). The chipset and disk documentation suggests a much higher speed being supported. (Maybe this is related to using a SATA disk with an IDE controller?)

Suspend

Fan spins while suspended to RAM, so I use only suspend to disk.

Battery

The machine can work up to two hours on battery. The manufacturer claims lower power use of 12 Watts for the SSD version, data available to the system suggests it being similar for some uses of the HDD version.

Most netbooks work much longer on battery, this results from both bigger batteries and lower CPU power usage. Users who need this use external batteries (I never used them).

Connectors

The device has external connectors for VGA, power, 3.5 mm microphone and speaker, 100 Mbps Ethernet and three USB ports. Its layout prevents using both an Ethernet wire and an USB mouse (the wire would be on the place where I would keep the mouse), this doesn’t change mice being uncomfortable for me in all cases.

Boot firmware

The YeeLoong is often called the only laptop not requiring nonfree software. EC and hard disk firmware are exceptions.

All Lemote machines use a derivative of PMON2000 as boot firmware. It is free (under a four clause BSD license), although on all other devices than YeeLoongs with 2F CPUs it requires a sourceless VGA BIOS blob.

PMON initializes the hardware, shows a menu of kernels to run (using a GRUB 0.97-like configuration file) and boots one of them, supports network booting and flashing itself. It’s not compatible with x86 BIOSes and is more powerful (e.g. it can boot a kernel from an ext2 filesystem, although it doesn’t support newer filesystems).

Booting is fast unless using an initrd (gNewSense and Parabola kernels don’t need it unless using an encrypted root filesystem) or GRUB 2 booted from PMON (I see no benefit of using it).

It is also possible to use GRUB 2 as a PMON replacement, installed directly to a PLCC chip (coreboot doesn’t support the machine). It is difficult to solve potential problems with it due to the PLCC chip being soldered in most devices (or difficult to access).

Software availability

A Debian-based system with very old packages was installed on the machine. I haven’t used it long before installing gNewSense metad. (The installer was broken at that time, so I haven’t used it initially for two weeks before it was fixed; this problem motivated me to use IRC, this led me into contributing to several free software projects and using fully free GNU/Linux distributions.) The review at OSNews has more details on this system (and many other features that I haven’t noticed).

gNewSense has most Debian packages available. There is GHC without the interactive interpreter and a slow Java implementation (without JIT). Mono and Valgrind are not available (although the newest release of Valgrind supports MIPS and is included in Debian Jessie). Gnash is available, although it is too slow to be useful for me and there are better specific tools for most tasks that I could need it for.

While Debian and gNewSense use packages built for any little-endian MIPS system, Parabola has them optimized for Loongson 2F and uses a different ABI called N32 that uses 64-bit registers (and all floating point registers, unlike O32 used in Debian) while 32-bit pointers are used (so a single process can use only 2 GiB of virtual memory: the highest address bit is used for kernel and physical memory). As an advantage, some articles suggest it being 30% faster on some operations. A disadvantage is lack of support for many architecture-specific packages like Java, Valgrind or GHC (and much more portability problems in other packages like WebKit which doesn’t need to use architecture-specific code). Now more packages start to require a JIT, so modern Mozilla software and Qt 5 aren’t available on N32.

One of the reasons for RMS to use such a machine is that it is not supported by popular nonfree operating systems, so it won’t be used to promote them, unlike OLPC.

Performance

The CPU speed is not a problem unless compiling distro packages or using Java or other programs that are optimized for JIT not available or working on the MIPS ABIs used (or when playing videos without large assembly patches using its SIMD extension).

Building GCC, Mozilla browsers or WebKit is too slow to maintain these packages correctly in Parabola. Typical tasks like Web browsing are interactive enough, unless building a package at the same time or viewing a big JPEG image (although this is also slow on my AMD64 machine).

Having played free games like Wesnoth, FreeDink and DCSS (without tiles which require hardware-accelerated OpenGL), I’m not convinced that good games need 3d acceleration.

Availability

There were YeeLoongs available in Europe from Tekmote Electronics (where I bought mine from) and KD85.com. Freedom Included was selling them in the USA with gNewSense preinstalled.

The manufacturer site claims of ‘very competitive price’, this certainly isn’t true in Europe in comparison with non-freedom-respecting x86 netbooks.

Summary

I know three main reasons to use a YeeLoong: it respects user’s freedom, it can be used for MIPS programming and it is a small and portable laptop. I don’t know any good alternatives for the first two of these uses. Except for the graphics performance, I believe the YeeLoong might still be an appropriate device as a general purpose small laptop (although this is not a significant problem for most of my text-oriented needs).