from Hacker News

Qualcomm hardware support increasingly in good shape with Linux kernel

by quic_bcain on 2/19/24, 8:29 PM with 37 comments

  • by dirkf on 2/19/24, 9:24 PM

    On a related note: I have the impression Broadcom is more and more losing terrain to the likes of Qualcomm and Mediatek. A couple of years ago nearly everybody was using Broadcom chips in their products (or at least in the consumer-grade telecom devices I'm familiar with as part of my job). Now I'm seeing a shift away from them.

    I can't really say if it's due to better features, price, vendor support, open source support, documentation, or perhaps all of the above. In any case, some competition is certainly welcome.

  • by seba_dos1 on 2/19/24, 10:42 PM

    One thing I noted from the FOSDEM talk is that even though Qualcomm supports mainlining through Linaro, it's done based on existing code (both NDAed and public) and there's close to no documentation provided neither publicly nor privately to the devs. When you'll happen to work on that code in the future in mainline Linux trying to catch some bug, all you'll have to cross-check things with may be the same buggy code you try to fix - so in the end it's just like it would be reverse engineered, but without all the notes that community may have produced while trying to understand the thing.

  • by jacooper on 2/19/24, 9:22 PM

    I was excited for the upcoming snapdragon X elite till I saw this

    > But still a work-in-progress is audio support, DP Alt-Mode, enabling the DSPs, USB-C power delivery, and GPU acceleration

    No GPU acceleration? And somehow this is seen as good support?! The reverse engineered Asahi Linux driver has better support than whatever this is.

  • by ranguna on 2/20/24, 8:53 AM

    Can't wait to switch my laptop to a phone running full Linux.

    Imagine just walking around with one normal phone and one phone that you can hook to with xreal glasses, connect that phone to a remote server and you got yourself all the power you want in your hands (provided you have good Internet).

  • by jauntywundrkind on 2/19/24, 9:03 PM

    There really has been a huge shift for Qualcomm, and it's great to see.

    It's so interesting to me to guess how and where this is happening, what the pressure points are driving this. It feels like there's two areas that have been highly motivated to make Qualcomm more than good for limited-lifetime appliances running unmaintained kernel.

    First around were the motivated hobbyists, namely, OpenWRT. OpenWRT already had a close relationship with part of Qualcomm: the Atheros (acquired by Qualcomm in 2011 for $3.1B) wifi chipsets were the linux wifi chips to have. But as MIPS faded and ARM rose, Qualcomm become more and more dominant in OpenWRT space. Trying to port vendor SDKs and drivers in, and then work on more upstream support, has been a long running OpenWRT project. I myself own a number of Nighthawk X4S/R7800 (IPQ4019 chipset, 802.11ac wave-2) routers (Maybe soon time to move on, if only there were good options!).

    Those efforts to upstream are really getting to a good spot these past couple years. ipq40xx was ok but rough. After some kind of iffy early chip releases that seem destined to never be supported, most recent ipq80xx chipsets with 802.11ax/wifi6 seem well supported on mainline. But it's still not ideal: Qualcomm has a bunch of iptables-bypassing network-processing offloading support for the +2 of it's 4+2 cores, that is unlikely for OpenWRT to ever support (https://forum.openwrt.org/t/xiaomi-ax3600-performance-thread...). Especially as wifi speeds tick higher it's unlikely new routers will be able to go fast enough unless there's some breakthrough in network-offload, and with great solutions like VPP about it's not impossible, but it seems unlikely & requiring quite a heroic feat to even get started reverse engineering & beginning the process. (Personally it makes me just want to use x86 based routers with m.2 cards for APs & skip Qualcomm cpus.)

    The other prong of upstreaming comes from a very different place: Google. Specifically Chromebooks, which have really pushed hard for support to get upstreamed on supported platforms. I think it might now be an out and out requirement to have upstream support! This added real weight to the drive to upstream. We also see MediaTek having done amazing things with getting their stuff upstreamed, often seeing chips consumers wont see for years getting kernel support, with many of the target boards becoming future Chromebooks. Chips like the 8cx were pretty early onboard here.

    The chip here is more phone oriented, a Snapdragon Gen 3. Things seemed to really start going much faster a year or two back. Looking at PostmarketOS, the support matrix really isn't bad for mainline kernels and top-tier chips (https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Qualcomm_mainline_porting)! I'd love to see support expanded for lower-market chips (such as the 7+ Gen 2, https://www.anandtech.com/show/18775/qualcomm-announces-snap...), which looks like it'd be a great mid-range tablet/small desktop core, if supported.

    It's still quite hazy to me how much Qualcomm is actually supporting/helping these efforts, versus how much is paid or free open source work. But, the future is exciting. Being able to run non-Android OSes really starts here. I don't know what specifically the changes will be, but able to have devices evolve & change beyond just being consumer appliances opens the doors of possibility, to new forms of computing. Letting folks adapt & change systems around them keeps giving rise to exciting new things, and I'm for it!