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
Nowadays the entire thing until you land in EL1 needs to be signed by Qualcomm as well. This is without "Secure Boot" enabled. OEMs only get to run code under the hypervisor. And you might want to use a part of the hardware but someone decided the VM your code runs in shouldn't have access to that, too bad.
> ... 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?
It matters when you're doing custom hardware, or when you're designing a product where boot speed matters, or when you need to implement something special.
A full-featured U-Boot implementation would be fine IMO. But for the generations that I've used, that's not on the table. What we get is a proprietary flow through a proprietary hypervisor into a fork of Android's bootloader (even if vanilla Linux is the target OS). There's no way to control startup boot options, and no way to use KVM, Xen or any hypervisor except the proprietary one that's also part of the boot chain.
This doesn't lend itself to flexible products, or to products that are easy for a company to design or support. That is why things like this happen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46008156
Aside from the sibling comments, it also matters that you need to be able to review it if you need to build a truly "secure" product. History is littered with broken, unfixable secure boot implementations.
Because a computer isn't just a processor. It has to interact with an EC, IO controllers, and whatnot, and if you don't have control over the boot chain, all of that stuff becomes an even bigger PITA than it already is.
Awesome, that's great to hear. Now if Qualcomm would only relax the walls between their business units, their other customers could benefit as well.
Who benefits from having separate BUs maintain fully separate software stacks? It's duplicated, wasted effort on Qualcomm's part. Maybe it lets them double-charge their customers for this duplicate effort, but that feels short-sighted. It leaves a bad taste in their customers' mouths. And there's certainly no benefit in delivered software quality.
Qualcomm should be making it easy for everybody to buy and use their chips, not artificially segmenting every single customer. They could sweep the market so hard if they were just a little less greedy.
If I was to guess, id say someone did this as a side project at QC because maybe they like FOSS and want to give something back. Given the partnership between QC and MSFT for laptops and Google for android, I won't be surprised if we never see interest from QC for any real linux hardware.
In particular, the long battery runtimes – usually one of the strong arguments for ARM devices – were not achieved under Linux.
A viable approach for BIOS updates under Linux is also missing at this stage, as is fan control.
Virtualization with KVM is not foreseeable on our model, nor are the high USB4 transfer rates.
Video hardware decoding is technically possible, but most applications lack the necessary support.
There is nothing in this press release to suggest they've changed.
White label reseller isn't really the right term. They don't design most of their components and buy them wholesale, but they do assemble them and most relevant to this particular comment thread, they do a lot of the device firmware and support stuff.
It's exactly the stuff that they actually do themselves that Qualcomm has been making very hard.
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:
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."
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.
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.
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
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.
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 problem was that they had the performance claims and marketing of Apple but the implementation of Microsoft Teams. Apple M1 was shaky but all the groundwork was there and it took off. Qualcomm was highly questionable at best.
Software-wise: Ubuntu Touch, PostmarketOS, and Mobian are all actively maintained. Ubuntu Touch uses Lomiri as its UI which is somewhat bespoke (though they're working on disentangling it from the distro for packaging elsewhere), the others use various mobile Linux UIs (and there's a surprisingly large variety of options there).
> 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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
Asahi is also still a platform with a huge pile of out of tree patches on top because the platform itself is pretty unusual, requiring for example, a 16K page size kernel which is unlike pretty much every other arm Linux platform.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
560g is fine. But I wouldn't want to work on a 11.5" device. Something between 13" and 14" is my preferred size.
And I would want to do a normal Debian stable installation. Just like I can on a Lenovo laptop. The Librem 11 comes with their own Debian based distro and I can't find any info if I can install a normal Debian on it from scratch.
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.
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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.
Nowadays the entire thing until you land in EL1 needs to be signed by Qualcomm as well. This is without "Secure Boot" enabled. OEMs only get to run code under the hypervisor. And you might want to use a part of the hardware but someone decided the VM your code runs in shouldn't have access to that, too bad.
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?
A full-featured U-Boot implementation would be fine IMO. But for the generations that I've used, that's not on the table. What we get is a proprietary flow through a proprietary hypervisor into a fork of Android's bootloader (even if vanilla Linux is the target OS). There's no way to control startup boot options, and no way to use KVM, Xen or any hypervisor except the proprietary one that's also part of the boot chain.
This doesn't lend itself to flexible products, or to products that are easy for a company to design or support. That is why things like this happen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46008156
Gunyah is disappearing from new chips, slowly but surely.
X2 doesn't have it anymore, the IoT range has it as optional now. And it's going to be deployed less from there
Who benefits from having separate BUs maintain fully separate software stacks? It's duplicated, wasted effort on Qualcomm's part. Maybe it lets them double-charge their customers for this duplicate effort, but that feels short-sighted. It leaves a bad taste in their customers' mouths. And there's certainly no benefit in delivered software quality.
Qualcomm should be making it easy for everybody to buy and use their chips, not artificially segmenting every single customer. They could sweep the market so hard if they were just a little less greedy.
This is much better than that. Not great yet, but much better than that in comparison.
Go all in or go home, qualcomm.
Yet 2 days ago, Tuxedo Computers announced they were abandoning Qualcomm due to crap support. (https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/26/tuxedo_axes_arm_lapto...).
There is nothing in this press release to suggest they've changed.It's exactly the stuff that they actually do themselves that Qualcomm has been making very hard.
Does Apple offer better support? Qualcomm offers commercial support. I guess Tuuxedo Computers didn't pay for the support?
Do AMD and Intel require Tuuxedo to pay for premium support in order to get working Linux drivers? No, of course not.
Qualcomm's support for Linux is embarrassing when you compare it to pretty much any processor manufacturer except Apple.
- 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.
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.
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.
This is no different from any other company that has "embraced" open source.
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
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-lapt...
are there any linux phone projects that are actively maintained and used in 2025? i was under the impression that android kinda subsumed them all.
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.
https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Discontinuation-of-ARM-no...
For example https://www.pcworld.com/article/2463714/tested-intels-lunar-...
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This changes the game. I’d rather use native Linux than Asahi (though the latter is amazing).
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
Seems like the middle ground between SBCs and huge servers is a bit underserved in ARM...
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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.
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.
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.
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.
(And I don't think Qualcomm has seen the light - my understanding is that the Turnip drivers are purely reverse engineered.)
I hope they succeed but the last generation has only recently become mostly usable for specific distros. General support may take a while.
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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?
Apparently WSL2 does work, it pulls a native ARM64 Linux distro and then proceeds as usual.
Does this count? https://puri.sm/products/librem-11
And I would want to do a normal Debian stable installation. Just like I can on a Lenovo laptop. The Librem 11 comes with their own Debian based distro and I can't find any info if I can install a normal Debian on it from scratch.
The hardware is great, though, I love the 12” Surface with the X1E. WSL2 works great!
> 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.
Maybe that part of the driver isn't finished yet?
It actually introduces new things into the UAPI because no one else did fully-stateful AV1 decode before.
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