There are laptops you buy to get work done. And then there's the Lemote Yeeloong — a machine you buy specifically to not get work done, but to prove a point. The point being: real hackers don't need Intel, they don't need AMD, and they certainly don't need your corporate-approved UEFI. They need a MIPS processor, a crusty BIOS, and the kind of stubborn optimism that only OpenBSD can satisfy.
Last week, a hacker named oldvcr posted his odyssey of getting OpenBSD running on a Yeeloong. The blog post is part field guide, part war diary. It's the kind of writing that makes you miss the early 2000s, when laptops were bricks and every driver was a prayer. The Yeeloong, for the uninitiated, is a Chinese-made laptop built around the Loongson (formerly Godson) processor — a MIPS-compatible chip that was supposed to liberate China from x86 dependence. Instead, it mostly just liberated a few hundred buyers from their wallets.
But here's the thing: this hardware is still relevant. Not because it's fast — it's not. Not because it's cheap — it was $300 in 2009, which is roughly $450 in 2026 Monopoly money. No, the Yeeloong matters because it represents the last gasp of truly open, hackable hardware. No Intel ME, no AMD PSP, no signed firmware. Just you, a MIPS CPU, and the dragons.
The Dragon in the Room
The 'dragons' in the blog's title aren't mythical beasts — they're the BIOS bugs, the undocumented registers, and the sheer will of a Chinese manufacturer to make your life miserable. The Lemote Yeeloong ships with a proprietary BIOS called PMON, which is about as friendly as a cornered badger. It's a 2000-line assembly monster with no documentation and a habit of corrupting memory if you look at it wrong.
Oldvcr's approach is instructive: he doesn't fight the BIOS. He works around it. He uses OpenBSD's bootloader to bypass PMON's quirks, patches the kernel to ignore certain hardware states, and generally treats the machine like a patient with a chronic illness. It works — but barely. The result is a laptop that boots, that runs X11, that can browse the web (if you have the patience of a saint). But it's held together with tape and good intentions.
"The Yeeloong isn't a laptop. It's a sacramental object for people who believe computing should hurt a little."
And that's the real story here: the Yeeloong isn't practical. It never was. It's a statement. A weird, beautiful, infuriating statement about what we've lost in the modern computing landscape.
What We've Lost — And What We Gained
In 2026, your laptop is a surveillance device. Intel ME runs a separate operating system you can't see. AMD PSP is a black box. ARM's TrustZone is a walled garden. Every modern processor has a shadow computer that can read your keystrokes, access your RAM, and phone home without your knowledge. The Yeeloong? Its BIOS is buggy, but it's your BIOS. You can dump it, patch it, replace it. MIPS has no hidden cores, no management engine, no backdoors that we know of.
That's the trade-off: security through obscurity versus security through transparency. The Yeeloong chooses transparency. OpenBSD, with its relentless focus on correctness and auditability, is the perfect partner for this philosophy. Every line of code is vetted. Every bug is a challenge, not a feature.
But let's be real: most people don't need this level of control. They need a laptop that doesn't crash during Zoom calls, that can play YouTube without stuttering, that has a battery life measured in hours, not minutes. The Yeeloong fails on all three counts. It's a dog. It's a museum piece. It's a 2009 netbook with an ideological hard-on.
And yet, I can't help but admire the effort. Oldvcr's blog post is 5,000 words of this worked, then this broke, then I fixed it by twiddling a bit in the framebuffer driver. It's a love letter to the kind of computing that's become extinct — the era when you could truly own your machine, for better or worse.
The Hardware That Wouldn't Die
The Yeeloong's hardware is a time capsule. It uses a Loongson 2F processor at 800 MHz — roughly the speed of a Pentium III from 1999. It has 512 MB of RAM, a 40 GB hard drive, and a 10-inch LCD that's dim enough to read by candlelight. The GPU is a SiS 315, which was mediocre in 2002. The Wi-Fi is a ralink chip that requires a proprietary firmware blob (the one concession to non-free software).
And yet, people keep buying these things on eBay. There's a community of about 300 die-hards who maintain custom kernels, write drivers, and argue about the best way to handle the PMON's quirks. It's a tiny island of obsession in a sea of corporate computing.
What's remarkable is that OpenBSD has supported the Yeeloong since version 5.3 (2013). That's 13 years of support for a niche laptop with a dead manufacturer. Theo de Raadt, OpenBSD's founder, has a soft spot for obscure hardware — he once said, "If it has a CPU and doesn't have a management engine, I want to support it." The Yeeloong fits that bill perfectly.
The Verdict: A Labor of Love, Not a Tool
Should you buy a Lemote Yeeloong in 2026? Absolutely not. Your time is worth more than the $150 you'll spend on eBay (yes, they've depreciated). You will spend weeks getting it to work, and when it does, you'll have a machine that can't run modern browsers, can't play video, can't compile software in less than an hour. It's a curiosity, not a daily driver.
But should you read oldvcr's blog post? Yes. Twice. It's a reminder that computing used to be about the journey, not the destination. It's a testament to the kind of hacker who sees a broken BIOS not as a bug, but as a feature request. And it's a finger in the eye of the locked-down, obfuscated, monopolized hardware industry we now inhabit.
The Yeeloong is a dragon. And like all dragons, it's best admired from a distance. But thank God there are still people willing to fight them.
