Working around dragons with the Lemote Yeeloong laptop and OpenBSD
Summary
This article chronicles a detailed, hands-on exploration of running OpenBSD on Lemote’s Yeeloong Loongson-based laptop. It covers the PMON boot monitor lineage, the OpenBSD port for Loongson, bootstrapping from ext2/ext3, driver quirks, and the practical challenges of building and deploying a BSD/Open Source stack on vintage hardware, with performance comparisons and reflections on the hardware’s open-source potential.