Linux support is coming to Snapdragon X2 Series

Posted by aaronday 15 hours ago

Linux support is coming to Snapdragon X2 Series(www.qualcomm.com)

480 points | 204 commentspage 2

cromka 14 hours ago|

Qualcomm hired some developers back from Linaria and they have been providing support for a bunch of X2 laptops these past two, three months directly via Linux ARM MSM mailing list. I'm surprised it took them this long to announce this publicly.

Hopefully this means Framework releases an X2 mainboard as it would be a match made in heaven.

dansquizsoft 12 hours ago||

> Hopefully this means Framework releases an X2 mainboard as it would be a match made in heaven.

My friend showed me his brand new Framework the other day, but I couldn't hear his spiel about its features over the noise of its fan!

cromka 5 hours ago||

Was that Framework 13 Pro? I thought these were supposed to have Panther and be much more efficient and quiet?

wyldfire 1 hour ago|||

Yeah - especially if it could drop into existing framework laptop shells.

modeless 10 hours ago|||

Ooh, an X2 Elite Extreme Framework laptop with Linux supported would be very tempting.

cromka 5 hours ago||

*Linaro, sorry for the typo

jonkoops 5 hours ago||

Unless Qualcomm steps in and makes every laptop with their chip work flawlessly, I don't see a reason to step into their ecosystem. Right now it is basically flipping a coin when you buy an X1 or X2 product, as you are basically locked to the vendor's idea of 'support'. Qualcomm should coerce and collaborate with vendors to ensure their products are synonymous with great Linux support so that when I see their brand I know it is a good product.

baby_souffle 14 hours ago||

Didn't they say something similar about the first ones?

Consider me cautiously optimistic.

jordand 14 hours ago||

Qualcomm has been upstreaming Linux kernel support for the Snapdragon X for the past 2 years or so, but the community is still having issues with drivers and firmware on devices. I bought a surprisingly capable Lenovo mini PC with a Snapdragon X at a massive discount and it's stuck on Windows 11 for now.

baby_souffle 13 hours ago||

> Qualcomm has been upstreaming Linux kernel support for the Snapdragon X for the past 2 years or so, but the community is still having issues with drivers and firmware on devices.

Is QCM slow to upstream or are they doing things in an incomplete manner or is there some other reason?

I'm trying to imagine a world where intel or amd releases a new platform/chip and it takes _two years_ to get linux booting on it

TiredOfLife 1 hour ago|||

With x1 it was worse. They were literally demoing them running Debian because windows was not ready, but after release silence.

kayson 13 hours ago|||

Yeah there was a blog post about it but seems not much came from the effort

baby_souffle 13 hours ago||

> but seems not much came from the effort

That's been my experience dealing with QCM based devices running linux in the past. Some OEM buys a batch of chips, gets a reference design and an old version of the linux kernel with a zillion out-of-tree hacks and patches that make updates impossible.

I generally advise clients to use rockchip as they have _very_ good mainline support and put any QCM modem at the end of a USB connection so it doesn't hold the product back.

dansquizsoft 12 hours ago||

> Consider me cautiously optimistic.

Consider me dangerously pessimistic

drnick1 14 hours ago||

Sounds good, as long as a standard Linux distro can replace whatever operating system ships with these machines.

rickdeckard 6 hours ago||

If they want their platform to be a first-class citizen of Linux, they should commit on a mandatory device-tree release for all products.

Not some flaky "one release sometime after launch", a fully integrated release-chain for all components needed to boot Linux on any X2 series device

silon42 4 hours ago||

That's not a full solution... proper platform would have backward compatibility, so an OS from today will work on hardware released in 5 years.

pjmlp 6 hours ago||

That is why The Year of GNU/Linux desktop is never going to take off as such.

It was already proven by the whole netbooks, Android, WebOS, and ChromeOS.

Linux yes, as cost cut factor, and as means to power specific commercial products, running on top of WSL/Virtualisation Framework, or expensive racks on hyperscalers.

The whole community stuff, from OEMs point of view, only when it really has to be.

flakiness 14 hours ago||

If the upstream is properly done (that is a big if), this can be a go-to choice for the Linux laptop because it has much smaller config variations compared to Intel-based laptops: Everything from wifi (and even modem?), to audio, to camera ISP is included in the single SoC. If it works it works.

jordand 14 hours ago||

People have had a lot of issues with drivers and locked-down firmware on Snapdragon devices, so even with official Linux support for the chipset, the devices themselves could still be a nightmare to get working.

pixl97 12 hours ago|||

I wonder how long someone can spend a pile of tokens and start shredding these firmwares down to their actual instructions/code.

martinald 13 hours ago|||

I don't think so. Every device has locked down firmware really these days, it's not an issue (most peoples BIOS/UEFI/etc is very much not open source).

If the drivers are upstreamed and good, it should work well.

imglorp 14 hours ago||

Aren't all the Android Snapdragon phones already mostly there?

flakiness 13 hours ago|||

Android phones don't need (and often don't have) upstreamed "drivers". They use qualcomm's closed-source code. Also, Android user land driver (HAL) isn't useful for non-Android Linux distros.

preg_match 9 hours ago|||

Yes, with proprietary blobs. Oh, and also running a version of the Linux kernel that’s been out of support for years (on some devices, not all).

This is the danger when you don’t upstream your shit. Now you’re stuck on kernel 3 or 4 because your chip vendor is lazy. And Qualcomm has got to be one of the laziest.

cientifico 4 hours ago||

It will take years for Linux users to trust Qualcomm again.

It has been so many attempts to run Linux on this chips without any collaboration from Qualcomm. Companies even drop support after years of development.

Qualcomm provided efficiency (battery life). But intel is catching up fast to make Qualcomm irrelevant.

Welcome, but too late.

999900000999 13 hours ago||

When can I buy one ?

I want the stuff to work, I want Qualcomm to provide an easy process to grab a X2 Elite Windows Laptop and install Linux.

No magical binary blob extraction. I want everything tested.

With SteamFrame out we might even get decent gaming !

pjmlp 8 hours ago||

Support is coming because of Googlebooks, not because Qualcomm out of the pureness of their hearts is embracing GNU/Linux.

Expect binary drivers for specific releases of Ubuntu and Debian.

Also here is an answer to other day's why people still use Ubuntu.

prmoustache 6 hours ago|

They give 2 separate dates for debian and ubuntu which looks to me they will just release drivers but haven't decided to be good citizen and have their drivers in the mainline kernel source tree.

In other words: it might be a trap and you could get screwed in n years if they stop maintaining it and some kernel changes make the driver not compilable on newer versions.

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