Same-day upstream Linux support for Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5

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.

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).

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.

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.

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?

I wish this signup box did not cover the text, or at least there was some way to close/remove it.

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.

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

> 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.

I appreciate the gesture, but... just release the docs!

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

[dead]

This is cancer.

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