Working around dragons with the Lemote Yeeloong laptop and OpenBSD

Behold: the Guru of GNU! (Photo by Habib Mhenni, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.)

True enlightment only comes from a truly free computing experience, probably! And while there is no nerd who lacks an opinion on Richard Stallman personally, likewise let none claim he does not practice what he preaches. Why, the very laptop in front of him was selected deliberately because it can operate with no binary blobs and no firmware you couldn't examine or replace with your own, and runs his choice of fully libre operating systems. The fact it has a Chinese MIPS64 derivative in it was undoubtedly just more compound on the heat spreader.

Now, in my case, the fact that it is a MIPS-family system meant I certainly needed one in my unusual laptop collection. And since it can run OpenBSD ...

... it seemed like a good way to get nerdsniped in two ways by one computer: since I mostly run NetBSD as my BSD and server operating system of choice, I figured this was also a good way to learn OpenBSD on a highly portable netbook using an unusual platform. As usual, of course, the whole shooting match turned out to be a much longer journey than I'd anticipated, and my typical insistence on deviating from the beaten path (such as forcing it to run from the SD card slot and trying to build a browser from source) made it more so. But before we embark upon it, let's talk about why there's a Chinese MIPS derivative in this thing in the first place.