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Same-day upstream Linux support for Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5

qualcomm.com

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Re: Same-day upstream Linux support for Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5

#111

Post by Voultapher »

kbenson wrote: post #107
h14h wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 privat…

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 go…

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.

Re: Same-day upstream Linux support for Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5

#112

Post by jorvi »

kop316 wrote: post #18

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... . - Likewis…

> 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.

Re: Same-day upstream Linux support for Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5

#113

Post by TreeInBuxton »

hypercube33 wrote: post #39
kop316 wrote: post #18

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... . - Likewis…

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'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

Re: Same-day upstream Linux support for Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5

#115

Post by moondev »

didip wrote: post #110
moondev wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

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.

Re: Same-day upstream Linux support for Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5

#116

Post by Keyframe »

moondev wrote: post #86
arjie wrote: post #35

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 s…

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?

Re: Same-day upstream Linux support for Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5

#117

Post by bigyabai »

3836293648 wrote: post #74
arjie wrote: post #35

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).

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.

Re: Same-day upstream Linux support for Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5

#119

Post by nrclark »

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.

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