[HN Gopher] Same-day upstream Linux support for Snapdragon 8 Eli...
___________________________________________________________________
Same-day upstream Linux support for Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5
Author : mfilion
Score : 292 points
Date : 2025-11-27 16:19 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.qualcomm.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.qualcomm.com)
| imcritic wrote:
| This is cancer.
|
| Error 1009 Ray ID: 9a531bef5ba0e988 * 2025-11-27 16:47:44 UTC
| Access denied What happened? The owner of this website
| (www.qualcomm.com) has banned the country or region your IP
| address is in (RU) from accessing this website.
|
| Please see
| https://developers.cloudflare.com/support/troubleshooting/ht...
| for more details.
| micw wrote:
| I'd say collateral damage. Blame the guy who makes war.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Because other people do bad things these people aren't
| allowed to share ideas.
| imcritic wrote:
| This makes no sense. Just imagine you would get handcuffed
| tomorrow. Collateral damage. Blame some guy. Or a gal.
| cuu508 wrote:
| This is the price of living in a country that starts wars
| of aggression.
| ronsor wrote:
| Man, if only it were so easy to leave a country that
| starts wars. It's not as if the average citizen has
| little control over that or anything.
| boredatoms wrote:
| The price is that of a VPN subscription
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Fascist_regime_
| in_...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_revolution
| happosai wrote:
| http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26184
| IshKebab wrote:
| I'd be glad it's just handcuffs and not a bomb dropping on
| my head.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| /shrug. Try being from the UK, we don't even get imgur.
| imcritic wrote:
| Well, that's not the same, that's well-deserved.
| coffinbirth wrote:
| Trump? Biden? Obama? Bush? Clinton? Who do you mean?
| sl-1 wrote:
| Probably Vladimir Putin and his cronies.
| mathfailure wrote:
| Or any american president and his cronies. Or Pyotr
| Poroschenko and his cronies. Or Vladimir Zelensky and his
| cronies.
| neskorodev wrote:
| Gtfo.
| mathfailure wrote:
| Does it even matter with such a logic?
| remix2000 wrote:
| No no, you see, American war brings peace and Russian war
| brings despair.
| fainpul wrote:
| Even when it's not blocked, the layout is broken...
| ddtaylor wrote:
| I tried to get it on archive.is but it say in a loop forever.
| vanviegen wrote:
| You do realize that your country has has been fighting a very
| aggressive war, often intentionally targeting civilian targets
| like hospitals, high-rise residential areas and the power grid,
| and that because of that your country has been sanctioned by a
| large part of the world... Right?
| zimza wrote:
| Does Israel has access to this website ? Does the USA ?
| koiueo wrote:
| Are you stupid, or just pretending?
|
| Qualcomm is the USA, how do you imagine Qualcomm blocking
| access from the USA?
|
| Leaving aside the fact, that Israel is USA's ally,
| Palestine-Israel is quite different from Ukraine-russia.
|
| In his pre-SVO speech putin promised to solve "Ukrainian
| question" once and for all. It's not even a nazi vibe, it's
| straight nazi ideology. russians burn Ukrainian books,
| destroy Ukrainian museums. All on purpose... Israel, OTOH,
| has >20% Arabic population, all free to speak their
| language, to celebrate their culture and even to practice
| their religion.
|
| We can discuss and condemn many terrible things Israel
| does, but it's not even in the same ballpark with russia...
| comrade.
| ori_b wrote:
| I appreciate the gesture, but... just release the docs!
| modeless wrote:
| Has Qualcomm seen the light after working with Valve on Steam
| Frame? The news that Steam Frame would be running an open source
| Adreno GPU driver really caught me by surprise.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| It wouldn't surprise me if they're full of binary blobs
| jsheard wrote:
| They are, but that's hardly unique to Qualcomm. Tons of
| hardware with "proper" upstream Linux drivers still requires
| closed-source firmware blobs, and in particular with anything
| wireless that's probably an unwinnable battle due to
| regulatory constraints.
| saidinesh5 wrote:
| Closed source firmware is one thing that actually runs
| outside the Linux system... but there's also the user space
| libraries that are needed to interact with the drivers (eg
| libgl etc... or the vendor partition in most Android
| phones)
| surajrmal wrote:
| I don't think anyone expects non specialized os images to
| run on this hardware. That would require a standardized
| userspace abstraction layer like the one Android has been
| building out. The kernel is just a tiny piece of what's
| necessary because drivers have effectively moved into
| userspace. Graphics is the only area that has embraced
| this properly in "desktop Linux"
| tr45872267 wrote:
| >That would require a standardized userspace abstraction
| layer like the one Android has been building out Can you
| expound on this? And can desktop linux take advantage of
| it or do something similar?
| bsimpson wrote:
| I just checked: Frame is Gen 3 and the article is Gen 5.
| ff2400t wrote:
| The frame uses X Elite, their SoC designed or Laptops. These
| drivers are for mobile Line. Yeah the naming can be quite
| confusing.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| the frame is using a standard mobile snapdragon 8 gen 3
| with ARM designed cortex cores.
| cubefox wrote:
| The 8 Gen 3 also still uses the previous tile-based A7x
| GPU architecture, while newer chips use the "A8x family
| of GPUs based on the new Slice architecture".
| cherioo wrote:
| I am really hoping Valve will release a Frame Pro with Elite
| Gen 5 later :(
| jsheard wrote:
| Maybe eventually, but Valve don't tend to update their
| hardware very often so it'll probably be a while. They went
| over 6 years between their last VR headsets, and the Deck
| is over 3 years old now with no hint of a successor coming
| (the OLED version is more recent but that was a minor
| iteration with mostly the same specs).
| modeless wrote:
| I care a lot more about the screen resolution than the
| chip. The Steam Frame would make a really cool Linux
| workstation if the pixels per degree on the display matched
| typical monitors. Unfortunately, the resolution would have
| to be much higher than it is.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| They've been working on better mainline Linux support for a
| while now, but their last generation is still catching up on
| the driver side of things.
|
| I hope they succeed but the last generation has only recently
| become mostly usable for specific distros. General support may
| take a while.
| daemonologist wrote:
| My impression from the emulation folks is that the proprietary
| drivers are chock full of problems. I suspect it was open
| source drivers or nothing (i.e., back to an AMD x86 solution
| like the Steam Deck).
|
| (And I don't think Qualcomm has seen the light - my
| understanding is that the Turnip drivers are purely reverse
| engineered.)
| freehorse wrote:
| I wish this signup box did not cover the text, or at least there
| was some way to close/remove it.
| webdevver wrote:
| yeah i had to inspect element and delete the html node. theres
| a double-space in the first line of the top summary section.
|
| presentation is half the message!
| mg wrote:
| Does that mean that one will be able to purchase tablets with
| this chip and replace the OS with Linux?
|
| That would be great. As far as I know, there currently are no
| options for lightweight tablets that support Linux.
|
| Not sure how well WSL2 on tablets work. Does anybody here have
| experiences with WSL2 on tablets like the new Microsoft Surface
| Pro that uses the Snapdragon X Elite chip?
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| I really hope this is the case because I'd love to have an
| arm64 laptop for work. Then binaries in my laptop will work on
| my embedded systems, generally.
| jsheard wrote:
| https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/how-well-does-w...
|
| Apparently WSL2 does work, it pulls a native ARM64 Linux distro
| and then proceeds as usual.
| conradev wrote:
| The Linux support on the X1E today is lacking. I'm much more
| optimistic for the X2E.
|
| The hardware is great, though, I love the 12" Surface with the
| X1E. WSL2 works great!
| hypercube33 wrote:
| I have the 8 gen 3 and wsl and hyperv work fine just can't
| really use x86 binaries / containers / operating systems.
| jsheard wrote:
| I think the performance of x86 VMs would be pretty poor
| anyway due to the high overhead of TSO emulation. Windows ARM
| doesn't have the benefit of hardware assistance like macOS
| does, and the tricks that Microsoft came up with to mitigate
| the impact rely on metadata that only MSVC emits, so anything
| compiled with GCC or LLVM would always hit their emulators
| slow path.
| quotemstr wrote:
| > Windows ARM doesn't have the benefit of hardware
| assistance like macOS does
|
| I can understand Apple Silicon having an _initial_
| advantage due to its hardware TSO support, but I 'd have
| expected some combination of efforts at ARM and Qualcomm to
| have caught up by now. Shouldn't ARMv9 have a standardized
| (if optional) TSO mode? I'm disappointed by the foot-
| dragging.
| jsheard wrote:
| Yeah it does seem backwards that Apple was the most on
| the ball with this, when their MO is to force developers
| to migrate to their newest platform in short order, while
| Microsoft will be stuck dealing with x86 backwards
| compatibility for the next 25 years.
| fsflover wrote:
| > As far as I know, there currently are no options for
| lightweight tablets that support Linux.
|
| Does this count? https://puri.sm/products/librem-11
| miyuru wrote:
| > Hardware-accelerated video playback of H.264 (AVC), H.265
| (HEVC) and VP9 video streams
|
| > Hardware-accelerated video recording into H.264 (AVC) and H.265
| (HEVC) formats
|
| no mention of AV1? Surprised since most websites including YT
| uses it heavily.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| The Qualcomm marketing spec sheet mentions AV1 decoding:
| https://www.qualcomm.com/content/dam/qcomm-martech/dm-assets...
|
| Maybe that part of the driver isn't finished yet?
| saagarjha wrote:
| Or licensed.
| jsheard wrote:
| Isn't the whole point of AV1 that it's royalty free, as
| opposed to H264/265/etc?
| saagarjha wrote:
| For the codec, sure. But there can always be more
| restrictions on the IP block, driver code, etc.
| ZeroCool2u wrote:
| Yeah, and the main problem with HEVC/H265 is the patent
| encumbrance. Very odd, but hopefully it's just coming a
| bit later.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| It started like that. But now there are at least 2
| different patent pools that want rent.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| AV1 is designed to be license free, so unless they
| outsourced their driver development to another company I
| don't think there's anything to license.
| kop316 wrote:
| As someone who uses Mobile Linux, I am pretty excited to see
| this, but I can't help but wonder if this is only a "Business
| decision" and not necessarily Qualcomm turning over a new leaf
| for being FOSS friendly:
|
| - Their Snapdragon X laptop didn't do very well, and they likely
| realize an ARM Windows laptop will always be a second class
| citizen: https://www.techpowerup.com/329255/snapdragon-x-failed-
| qualc... .
|
| - Likewise, Mobile SoCs are completely dependent on Android
| without proper upstreaming (which they haven't done in the past).
|
| - They are seeing Valve spending time and money on FOSS support
| paying off, especially with their new hardware releases.
|
| On the other hand, proper upstreaming of the chips give them much
| more flexibility for different linux-based OSes.
| alganet wrote:
| A businesss decision would be great. What would suck would be a
| marketing decision.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| Today's marketing decisions are tomorrow's business
| decisions.
| alganet wrote:
| Today's marketing decisions are tomorrow's deprecations.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| Snapdragon does poorly I think because it's a bet if it works
| or not. Windows runs things seamlessly other than OpenGL (it
| can run that too but it's not anything strait forward - needs
| the gl to dx store app thing) but the other reason is cost. for
| the premium business laptop most buyers (business) won't budge
| off Intel even because of the "no one got fired for buying IBM"
| mentality at the big Enterprises Ive been at.
|
| I will say with my 8 gen 3 snapdragon I'm impressed and also
| disappointed - stupid thing needs active cooling and I'm pretty
| sure it's bad enough that it's desoldered or damaged the core
| or something from heat but also you can't get driver updates
| for the GPU if you wanted because Qualcomm be the way it do.
| HackingWizard wrote:
| Driver update depends on your OEM. Both ARM and Qualcomm send
| driver updates for their premium and upper highend Socs. The
| support reaching your phone is on the OEM. Google has started
| to push direct GPU driver updates starting with Pixel 10. So,
| hopefully others may follow too.
| robotnikman wrote:
| Usually GPU vendors (Nvidia, Intel, AMD) provide a way to
| download and install drivers manually (on Windows),
| including specific versions or older versions. Qualcomm is
| an outlier in this case.
| CopperWing wrote:
| No more: https://www.qualcomm.com/developer/blog/2025/05/
| introducing-...
| TreeInBuxton wrote:
| I've used basically every Windows on Arm machine - I actually
| quite like my X Elite ThinkPad T14s Gen6, compared the the
| X13s - feels like they got everything right, that the X13s
| got wrong
| zamadatix wrote:
| It'll probably be as much of a second class citizen elsewhere
| (the real problem is the hardware hasn't as good as Apple
| Silicon laptops but has been in the same price class at the
| bottom) but it's good they chase everywhere rather than just
| one use case.
| kop316 wrote:
| In the case of Linux, that issue is solely because of non-
| upstreamed drivers. With that, it can be a first class
| citizen just like any other processor.
| zamadatix wrote:
| It's second class on Windows because it doesn't support
| game DRM and generally performs worse for the price than an
| x86 laptop. About the thing it really has going for it is
| better battery life. Using Linux doesn't really change
| either of those problems, though it does get you away from
| the mess that is Windows 11.
|
| 1st party native software support is high and 3rd party
| native software support is higher than Linux. Both have
| feature complete userspace emulation layers for the 3rd
| party part (largely game focused) Windows doesn't need
| Proton for that. Both can run open source apps natively.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| I'd imagine it's purely because not doing it turned out to be
| PITA in the long term.
|
| As with pretty much all other ARM cpu vendors that pushed for
| their own kernel fork just to have drivers that did not need to
| be okayed by mainstream kernel, it was faster iteration to
| deliver something working to their clients; but it was also
| PITA to their clients, especially when industry started
| demanding longer support for their devices
| kelnos wrote:
| Of course it's a "business decision". Companies don't do things
| for any other reason. They see a benefit to upstreaming in this
| instance, and will do it again (or not) depending on whether or
| not they expect to see benefits in the future.
|
| This is no different from any other company that has "embraced"
| open source.
| h14h wrote:
| I'm personally rooting for "business decision" over "turning
| over a new leaf".
|
| If FOSS support is motivated by a clear profit motive, then
| it'll be viewed positively by shareholders and stick around no
| matter who is in charge. If FOSS support comes from "turning
| over a new leaf", it could be dropped at a moment's notice in
| response to a leadership change.
|
| IMO we will always see far better FOSS support from the private
| sector when the time they invest has a positive ROI that is
| obvious and easy to brag about in a quarterly earnings call.
| kbenson wrote:
| Incentives trump feelings for publicly traded companies 99
| times out of 100. People constantly anthropomorphize them,
| but they aren't people (regardless of similarities in the
| law), and they definitely don't act like people, at least
| normal ones. At best, you can view them as something like a
| sociopath. I wouldn't look at a sociopath acting nicer and
| think "oh, they turned over a new leaf" because they aren't
| just going to change how their mind works, I'd think "oh,
| they found a reason to act in a way I like for the time
| being. I hope it isn't short lived."
| Voultapher wrote:
| I like to call them slow-AI. They are paperclip optimizing
| AIs. No single component wants the larger outcomes, yet
| they happen. These slow-AIs are terraforming our planet
| into a less habitable one in order to make GDP number go
| up, at any cost.
| vladms wrote:
| People changed environment even before these
| optimizations. I think now it's more a problem of fast
| enough "catch-up and converge", for example for CO2 :
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-
| capita?c... - if the rich countries would reduce a bit
| faster (using better technologies) then those
| technologies could be used by the others and impact would
| be reduced.
| jorvi wrote:
| > Their Snapdragon X laptop didn't do very well, and they
| likely realize an ARM Windows laptop will always be a second
| class citizen
|
| Why? So far ARM laptops provide either vastly better battery
| life for the same performance or vastly better performance for
| the same battery life. Even versus discrete GPUs.
|
| Within a couple years from now you're gonna look like an utter
| fool for buying x86 (and Nvidia / AMD / Intel GPU) unless
| Intel, AMD and Nvidia really pull their head out of the sand.
|
| There's a few specific workloads like local LLM and legacy
| where you'd want a discrete GPU or x86, but otherwise it is
| looking like GG.
| tensegrist wrote:
| the year of linux on the arm desktop cannot come soon enough
|
| also, not to beat a horse that is by now six feet under, but
|
| > No delays, no hurry-up-and-wait, no registration. Just go get
| the new features.
|
| i'm so tired
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| i'm using Linux just fine on an ARM desktop for a long time,
| via Apple Silicon hypervisor enabled via the UTM macos app
| (which wraps both Qemu, which i don't use, and Apple Silicon
| hypervisor, which i do use, configurable when instantiating a
| new image from an iso).
|
| i mention this because perhaps you'd like it too. in my case
| fedora 43 works just fine, and fast.
| jama211 wrote:
| Ooh, thank you for this, I might try it on my m4 mac. Any
| tips or anything I should be aware of?
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| i used the UTM app from the App Store, and when creating a
| new instance, i select the Linux icon, which exposes the
| selection to enable Apple Silicon hypervisor rather than
| Qemu. it works perfectly. and it's fast. just great. I had
| used Asahi before, dual booting, which was a pain in the
| neck. this meanwhile is perfect.
| tensegrist wrote:
| what's the battery life like?
|
| do you use macos at all, or do you do ~everything within a
| full-screened fedora instance?
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| battery life seems totally fine. i believe the benefit over
| Asahi, for example, is that by using Apple Silicon
| hypervisor and the UTM macos app wrapping such, low level
| device drivers (including power management) are still Apple
| implementations.
| speed_spread wrote:
| How does Fedora handle the graphics and audio when running
| under hypervisor? Or is it strictly a command-line thing?
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| I'm using both fedora desktop and fedora kde and they look
| entirely normal, graphical desktops. i suspect (haven't
| verified) the UTM app wrapper is presenting access to the
| underlying Metal framework etc, so Fedora thinks its
| running on normal devices about which it already knew.
|
| I didn't have to do _anything_ weird: just grabbed the
| latest Fedora iso for aarch64 ( or arm64...i forget what it
| was named), and voila.
| Retr0id wrote:
| tbh I don't mind it so much on corporate blogs, it mainly
| grinds my gears when people choose to do it in (what would
| otherwise be) more personal writing.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| the year of linux desktop is called steamdeck
| arjie wrote:
| Woah, this is amazing. I've been looking for an ARM Linux machine
| for a while and ended up about to get M2 Pros in a rack running
| Asahi. It has been near impossible to get a Snapdragon Elite
| machine. The IdeaCentre or whatever is 2x the cost / performance
| and as far as I know is poorly supported.
|
| This changes the game. I'd rather use native Linux than Asahi
| (though the latter is amazing).
| jabedude wrote:
| Does this actually translate into any kind of probability of a
| manufacturer making a device with this chip?
| 3836293648 wrote:
| How is Asahi not native?
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Presumably OP meant a Linux distro using a normal upstream
| kernel?
| bigyabai wrote:
| The drivers, while impressively reverse-engineered, are
| basically alpha-quality by Linux standards. Even well-studied
| M1 machines will have spotty support in comparison to what an
| OEM can provide officially.
| noname120 wrote:
| Those that are implemented have been very reliable in my
| experience, I think that labeling them "alpha-quality by
| Linux standards" is a ridiculous claim
| moondev wrote:
| Get a DGX spark.
|
| Ships with aarch64 Ubuntu 24.04.
|
| Tons of cores and RAM.
|
| Very quiet and small
|
| UEFI bootloader - I installed Ubuntu 25.10 and ESXi arm edition
| just by booting the ISO
|
| usb-c power input (kinda cool)
|
| Insane connectx 200GbE RoCE networking
|
| 10GbE Ethernet
|
| Oh and an nvidia gpu with cuda and access to 128GB of unified
| memory
|
| It would be perfect if it had some kind of BMC or IPMI/redfish
| and an exposed PCIE slot. But this thing is an awesome arm64
| workstation no doubt.
|
| May try to install to a USB drive and hang another gpu off the
| nvme port just to see what happens
| didip wrote:
| Is it easy to buy a DGX Spark?
| moondev wrote:
| My microcenter has nvidia OEM flavor in stock. There are
| also flavors from all the other OEMs that differ slightly
| on cooling but mainly on chassis design.
| Keyframe wrote:
| This might sound silly question, but those of you who have
| digits/spark machine, has anyone run Fedora on it? I kind of
| ran away from Ubuntu back to Fedora because reasons. Bonus
| question, far-fetched, steam and games with FEX?
| SSLy wrote:
| It seems incredible but uhm, way out of my mitteleuropaishe
| budget
| arjie wrote:
| Oh that's a good shout. A friend did get one of these so I'll
| go take a look at it and see what it's like.
| imiric wrote:
| I don't think this changes the game as much as you think.
|
| AFAIU, the biggest challenge of running Linux on ARM machines
| is supporting the devicetree of each machine. After all, there
| is mainline kernel support for previous Qualcomm chips, yet
| very few machines with those chips can actually run Linux
| distros.
|
| So this is good news, but in practical terms it's just a
| marketing piece.
| wmf wrote:
| Can you buy this chip or is it only for Android phones? They have
| bad support for what you can buy (X Elite) but now they're
| touting upstreaming the chip you can't buy?
| aseipp wrote:
| Oryon v3 is designed for actual PC usage, not phones. But they
| aren't shipping until H1 next year. This is just a heads-up
| memo about Linux support, in that regard. Which is nice, I
| guess?
| E39M5S62 wrote:
| Eh. The CPU might be supported in Linux, but all of the rest of
| the hardware to make a laptop is left dangling in the wind. Look
| at the X1E laptops to see how far "upstream Linux support for a
| CPU" gets you.
|
| They aren't targeting enthusiasts with this announcement.
| summa_tech wrote:
| Does KVM hypervisor work? Previous Qualcomm CPUs have locked
| hypervisor mode behind Qualcomm proprietary blobs, and only
| allowed HyperV to use it - this was definitely the case for WOS
| laptops.
| walterbell wrote:
| MS Windows had an exclusive period for X1, but Google will
| support Android and ChromeOS on Qualcomm X2-based devices in
| 2026, which would require the pKVM/KVM hypervisor used by
| Android, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45368167
| afr0ck wrote:
| I worked at Linaro, who was contracting for Qualcomm. Qualcomm
| were pushing for some protected hypervisor called Gunyah (which
| had its own Linux interface and needed a new qemu port) that
| apparently no one liked. I tried to port it to KVM [1], but
| upstream folks (mostly Google) outright rejected the port.
| Otherwise KVM would have been available on QCOM boards. You can
| still try it. I have a Linux kernel and a Qemu port on my
| github [2,3]
|
| [1]
| https://lore.kernel.org/kvm/20250424141341.841734-1-karim.ma...
|
| [2] https://github.com/karim-manaouil/linux-next/tree/gunyah-
| kvm
|
| [3] https://github.com/karim-manaouil/qemu-for-gunyah
| aseipp wrote:
| The original Oryon systems allowed you to boot directly into
| EL2 and skip Gunyah via BIOS settings. I assume this will be
| the same.
| sylens wrote:
| I'd like to see the chips powering the new Surface devices in a
| Framework laptop at some point. Feel like they would be perfect
| for the Framework 12
| peppersghost93 wrote:
| I'm still mad about their lack of support for the 8cx gen 3. It's
| one of the first laptop SKUs they put out and support still isn't
| great.
| E39M5S62 wrote:
| The Lenovo x13s works pretty nicely these days, EL2 support
| aside. What problems have you faced?
| shmerl wrote:
| _> The Adreno user mode driver (UMD) from Qualcomm Technologies
| is available as a downloadable Debian package and provides Vulkan
| 1.4 API support as well as the necessary GPU-related firmware._
|
| Are they already using Turnip / Mesa as their Vulkan
| implementation or not yet? If not, they should. Valve are using
| Turnip on their Steam Frame.
|
| That would be another step of working with upstream, besides the
| kernel driver.
| h14h wrote:
| I hope this is motivated by shrewd decision-making in response to
| market pressure, as opposed to being strictly a perception thing.
|
| While it would be great for Qualcomm to "do the right thing" in
| supporting FOSS, I feel much more confident in that support being
| sustained long-term when it aligns with some profit motive.
|
| IMO the best case is that Qualcomm sees dollar signs when they
| imagine their Oryon CPUs and Adreno GPUs dominating the consumer
| linux landscape. There is definitely room to shake up x86
| (especially when it comes to perf/W and idle battery drain), and
| only a finite window for ARM to do so with RISC-V on the horizon.
|
| And to whatever extent Qualcomm et al now view Linux as a
| relevant personal computing platform, I think a massive amount of
| credit goes to Valve. I seriously doubt Linux support even enters
| the conversation at these companies without the Steam Deck's
| success.
| ninth_ant wrote:
| > When you get new hardware and new features, you don't want
| them sitting idle while you wait for patches to get upstreamed.
| Whether you develop for IoT, automotive, audio or mobile, when
| you get new features in a system-on-chip (SoC), you want to
| take advantage of them right now.
|
| Sure doesn't sound like mainstream consumer pc desktop is the
| target at all. Yes, they do provide instructions for how to run
| this on desktop but it's far from accessible for the
| overwhelming majority of pc users.
|
| I mean it's still a good thing for Linux desktop to have this
| as an option, I'm not complaining. But to be realistic those
| benefits feel tangential to what Qualcomm is aiming at here.
| h14h wrote:
| Fully agree. When I said "consumer linux landscape" &
| "personal computing platform" I was thinking much more
| broadly than desktop PCs.
|
| Admittedly a hypothetical Arm-based Steam Deck or Framework
| Laptop were at the forefront of my mind, but I think any
| consumer product running linux qualifies, be it "IoT,
| automotive, audio or mobile".
|
| Whether people are buying EVs with a slick linux-based
| infotainment screens, gaming handhelds running SteamOS, or
| smart-devices with fancy local AI features, I think the
| effect is the same. If Qualcomm predicts significant growth
| in demand for efficient, high perf devices running customized
| Linux distros, I think it could be great for FOSS at large.
| cmxch wrote:
| Actual bare metal Linux or under a hypervisor? I thought Qualcomm
| used a hypervisor to isolate the Linux environment that is taken
| for granted on x86.
| raggi wrote:
| Docs though?
| nrclark wrote:
| If anybody in Qualcomm leadership is reading this thread: this is
| a good start, and I applaud you for it. There is also a lot more
| to do if you're serious about growing your market penetration
| beyond phones.
|
| The drivers might be up on LKML, but they're not mainlined yet.
| And this is just gen5. It would be great if you could fix your
| gen4 and 4.5 drivers, so that people building products with your
| chips weren't stuck on an orphaned vendor kernel that doesn't
| even upstream to your public fork.
|
| Also your boot-chain is still closed and proprietary, and
| completely different than the one used by all other ARM vendors.
| Being the special snowflake is not helping your business or your
| customers.
|
| And don't even get me started on Gunyah and GearVM, or on the
| proprietary, locked nature of your BSP, or how far behind TI and
| NXP you are on software quality and ease of use. Maybe also
| consider releasing some actual documentation on your chips.
|
| I know multiple developers who have sworn off Qualcomm and will
| never design with your chips again at any price point. Your
| closed-off support model is 100% the culprit, and it hurts your
| core business. Any software support revenue that you managage to
| extract comes at the cost of goodwill and future chip sales.
|
| Your chips are good - best in the industry. If you can up your
| software game to match, you'll really meet your potential.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > ... Also your boot-chain is still closed and proprietary, and
| completely different than the one used by all other ARM
| vendors. Being the special snowflake is not helping your
| business or your customers. ...
|
| Why does the boot-chain matter? Can't we just have a custom
| U-Boot implementation that interacts with the bespoke boot
| chain while providing standard UEFI support to the rest of the
| system? Isn't that how Asahi works?
| nrclark wrote:
| It matters when you're doing custom hardware, or when you're
| designing a product where boot speed matters, or when you
| need to implement something special.
|
| A full-featured U-Boot implementation would be fine IMO. But
| for the generations that I've used, that's not on the table.
| What we get is a proprietary flow through a proprietary
| hypervisor into a fork of Android's bootloader (even if
| vanilla Linux is the target OS). There's no way to control
| startup boot options, and no way to use KVM, Xen or any
| hypervisor except the proprietary one that's also part of the
| boot chain.
|
| This doesn't lend itself to flexible products, or to products
| that are easy for a company to design or support. That is why
| things like this happen:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46008156
| znpy wrote:
| Yeah that page smells like a pr stunt.
|
| Go all in or go home, qualcomm.
| maufl wrote:
| I don't know much about ARM SoCs, is this something you would
| built a phone with? With all the talk about Google locking down
| Android, can Pine64 please go and make a Pinephone with this if
| that brings us closer to a Linux phone?
| binkHN wrote:
| Sorry. I don't trust these guys. Some of my Linux laptops use
| their wireless hardware and the drivers are so poor that, YEARS
| later, Wi-Fi still doesn't work right.
| wont_do_that wrote:
| How does it compare to Apple ARM M series and did they slap on a
| decent GPU? If not, they still got a long way to go...
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| While we are at Snapdragon processors ... Does anyone know what
| (not so technical-)user friendly distro runs without too many
| issues on a Snapdragon 850? I found Mobian listing Snapdragon
| 845, but I don't know at all, if that is almost the same or not
| compatible at all.
| apatheticonion wrote:
| How far away are we from being able to use new snapdragon laptops
| with Linux?
|
| I'm pretty keen to play around with Proton, FEX in a laptop that
| rivals the MBP
| cromka wrote:
| As far as I know, at least the modem support is half-baked or
| still non-functional.
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