from Hacker News

Upstreaming Linux kernel support for the Snapdragon X Elite

by dblitt on 5/14/24, 12:56 AM with 67 comments

• by sidkshatriya on 5/14/24, 7:18 AM

  I am excited about the prospect of Linux on another powerful aarch64 platform like Snapdragon Elite.

  But, as far as I can tell from the diagram on the link shared, you will boot into EL1 and not EL2. This means that you cannot run a hardware accelerated VM on KVM (via something like qemu).

  This makes a Snapdragon Linux laptop not as useful. BTW Asahi Linux on Apple Silicon enters on EL2 which allows qemu+KVM.

  Entering on EL1 instead of EL2 seems to be be an outstanding issue with current Snapdragon based Linux laptops too. Can anybody correct me here if I'm wrong ?

  > In short, our roadmap for the next six months includes work in these areas:

  > End-to-end hardware video decoding, on Firefox and Chrome

  > Implementation of the libcamera-SoftISP camera solution

  > GPU and CPU performance optimizations

  > Power optimizations (Suspend/DCVS)

  > Making our firmware openly available (in Linux-firmware)

  > Access to easy installers (Ubuntu and Debian)

  "Making our firmware openly available (in Linux-firmware)" is a big one. How are firmware updates currently distributed ? People using Linux Laptops probably don't want to be signing into some Qualcomm website to get latest firmware updates. Also downloading firmware updates from some random link either would not instill a lot of confidence either.

  I feel these 2 big items need to be addressed before Linux on Snapdragon can be a truly attractive option.

• by jamesy0ung on 5/14/24, 3:25 AM

  This is very cool, sure the performance isn’t as good as Apple’s stuff but a reasonably performant processor with official Linux support is very cool

• by zmk5 on 5/14/24, 3:43 AM

  Looks like by next LTS (for kernel 6.10 and 6.11) we'll have some good support for these chips. I wonder if any OEMs will make any Linux laptops for us to buy.

• by TwoNineFive on 5/21/24, 10:34 PM

  As someone who has worked with Qualcomm extensively and developed products based on their QSDK for years, this thread is way too optimistic.

  Qualcomm is heavy on sales and marketing and all of these promises have been made before on previous silicon releases. Their management hates open-source and only permits what is absolutely necessary. I am not hopeful for the future on these devices. They will be locked down and closed source in various ways that people just don't know about yet.

• by DeathArrow on 5/14/24, 6:04 AM

  Qualcomm hyped these CPUs since years showing results in benchmarks. We still don't have laptops with Snapdragon X Elite but meanwhile competition is releasing improved chips, see M4.

  I wonder if it won't be a little late when the laptops will be finally available to consumers.

• by k8svet on 5/14/24, 5:49 AM

  I promise that for every one of these posts from me, I suppress the urge multiple other times. But it would be amazing to see things like this published as a Nix flake instead of some debian image chucked over the wall. Seeing the flake would be a definitive, at-a-glance, reference for what is upstream and what is being pulled from some BSP.

• by jimbobthrowawy on 5/14/24, 6:05 PM

  Hopefully there's some decently performing AMD64 emulation available on linux, and it doesn't end up exclusive to windows. It's not as necessary as it is on most other OSs, bit it'd help pull along any random bits that don't have native binaries.

• by jeffreygoesto on 5/14/24, 8:16 AM

  It supports MTE, right? Can't wait for that to become mainstream.

• by spaintech on 5/14/24, 6:23 AM

  This is great news for those invested in ARM CPUs. I, for one, purchased a Lenovo X13s when it first came out for around 1,900 EUR. Unfortunately, my experience with it on Windows was subpar, and it was even worse on Linux. At the same time, I bought my wife a MacBook Air (not sure if it was an M1 or M2), and it was snappy and very pleasant to use. I bought the Lenovo based on the hype from benchmarks, and it seemed like a capable system initially. However, I couldn't tolerate all its limitations and ended up returning it, as it performed no better than a Chromebook I had bought earlier.

  I'm hopeful that Snapdragon will offer an alternative ARM platform for laptops that can handle more than just browsing. As consumers, we need options, and the more, the merrier. I'm still undecided about the short-term success of Snapdragon. For now, I'm betting/waiting on the MacBook Air with an M4 as my daily driver, although I do prefer the Lenovo ThinkPad format.

• by betaby on 5/14/24, 3:34 AM

  For me that list looks not that good compared to Asahi Linux for M1. No GPU, no camera, no suspend/resume.... I won't be spending my money on that platform until that sorted out. And judging from the other ARM platforms that means most likely never. Over-hyped and under-delivered.