Loongson Binary Translation Slated For Linux 6.6 - Helping MIPS / x86 / ARM On LoongArch

Loongson Binary Translation (LBT) support for the Chinese LoongArch CPU architecture is slated for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.6 cycle. Loongson Binary Translation aims to help speed-up and handle ARM / x86 / MIPS binary translation on LoongArch more efficiently with capable LoongArch processors.

Loongson Binary Translation (LBT) is part of the LoongArch ISA and currently has extensions for helping with x86, ARM, and MIPS. This means of accelerating binary translation exposes four additional scratch registers, x86/ARM eflags, and a x87 FPU stack pointer.

With this patch for the Linux kernel side there is support for saving/restoring those scratch registers for LBT use, exception handling, and maintaining the sigcontext. This initial LBT support for the Linux kernel is picked up by the "loongarch-next" branch of the Loongson kernel tree. As a result barring any issues it will in turn be added with the upcoming Linux 6.6 cycle.

More details on the LBT functionality can be found via the LoongArch ISA guide.