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.
> ... 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?
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
A businesss decision would be great. What would suck would be a marketing decision.
Today’s marketing decisions are tomorrow’s business decisions.
Today's marketing decisions are tomorrow's deprecations.
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).
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
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?
Is it easy to buy a DGX Spark?
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.
It seems incredible but uhm, way out of my mitteleuropaishe budget
Does this actually translate into any kind of probability of a manufacturer making a device with this chip?
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.
How is Asahi not native?
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.
Presumably OP meant a Linux distro using a normal upstream kernel?
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.
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.)
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.
I just checked: Frame is Gen 3 and the article is Gen 5.
I am really hoping Valve will release a Frame Pro with Elite Gen 5 later :(
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).
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.
The frame uses X Elite, their SoC designed or Laptops. These drivers are for mobile Line. Yeah the naming can be quite confusing.
the frame is using a standard mobile snapdragon 8 gen 3 with ARM designed cortex cores.
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".
It wouldn't surprise me if they're full of binary blobs
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.
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)
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"
>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?
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
I have the 8 gen 3 and wsl and hyperv work fine just can't really use x86 binaries / containers / operating systems.
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
> 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
I wish this signup box did not cover the text, or at least there was some way to close/remove it.
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!
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.
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
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
The original Oryon systems allowed you to boot directly into EL2 and skip Gunyah via BIOS settings. I assume this will be the same.
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
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.
Ooh, thank you for this, I might try it on my m4 mac. Any tips or anything I should be aware of?
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.
what's the battery life like?
do you use macos at all, or do you do ~everything within a full-screened fedora instance?
How does Fedora handle the graphics and audio when running under hypervisor? Or is it strictly a command-line thing?
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.
the year of linux desktop is called steamdeck
> 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.
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?
Or licensed.
Isn't the whole point of AV1 that it's royalty free, as opposed to H264/265/etc?
For the codec, sure. But there can always be more restrictions on the IP block, driver code, etc.
Yeah, and the main problem with HEVC/H265 is the patent encumbrance. Very odd, but hopefully it's just coming a bit later.
It started like that. But now there are at least 2 different patent pools that want rent.
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.
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?
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?
Docs though?
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.
The Lenovo x13s works pretty nicely these days, EL2 support aside. What problems have you faced?
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
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.
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.
> 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.
This is cancer.
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Please see https://developers.cloudflare.com/support/troubleshooting/ht... for more details.
I'd say collateral damage. Blame the guy who makes war.
This makes no sense. Just imagine you would get handcuffed tomorrow. Collateral damage. Blame some guy. Or a gal.
This is the price of living in a country that starts wars of aggression.
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.
The price is that of a VPN subscription
I'd be glad it's just handcuffs and not a bomb dropping on my head.
/shrug. Try being from the UK, we don't even get imgur.
Well, that's not the same, that's well-deserved.
Because other people do bad things these people aren't allowed to share ideas.
Trump? Biden? Obama? Bush? Clinton? Who do you mean?
No no, you see, American war brings peace and Russian war brings despair.
Does it even matter with such a logic?
Probably Vladimir Putin and his cronies.
Or any american president and his cronies. Or Pyotr Poroschenko and his cronies. Or Vladimir Zelensky and his cronies.
Gtfo.
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?
I tried to get it on archive.is but it say in a loop forever.
Even when it's not blocked, the layout is broken...
Cancer is you and your country