this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024
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If it runs Linux no need to translate anything. It's been a while since I ran Unix on a MIPS CPU but it should just work.
Not every app on Linux is compiled for MIPS, or am I wrong? I mean, technically Windows 8 RT could run natively on ARM without problems, except you couldn't run any apps, which made the whole thing 100% useless.
Unless every app can run natively, you'll always have to run some sort of translation layer, either in software, hardware or both. That layer will have native performance.
In a Linux distribution for a particular architecture all code is compiled to the underlying CPU architecture. Packages can also be built from source.
Proprietary software is different since it doesn't give you the freedom to build things from scratch. There are emulators, of course, but they all fundamentally suck.
Not all code is written portable. Say, many things won't compile or won't work under PPC64.
MIPS64 is not a very common architecture today. We know XOrg, FVWM and Emacs will probably work, so I expect this thing to be usable for many things. But not just as good as Linux on amd64.
https://www.debian.org/ports/mips/ supports Loongson 3 so it seems everything I'd need is in the green.