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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

#121

Post by SSLy »

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…

It seems incredible but uhm, way out of my mitteleuropaishe budget

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

#122

Post by zozbot234 »

nrclark wrote: post #119

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…

> ... 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?

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

#123

Post by alganet »

throwaway173738 wrote: post #104
alganet wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#124

Post by vladms »

Voultapher wrote: post #111
kbenson wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People changed environment even before these optimizations. I think now it's more a problem of fast enough "catch-up and converge", for example for CO2 : https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c... - if the rich countries would reduce a bit faster (using better technologies) then those technologies could be used by the others and impact would be reduced.

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

#125

Post by nrclark »

zozbot234 wrote: post #122
nrclark wrote: post #119

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…

> ... 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…

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

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

#127

Post by [deleted] »

nrclark wrote: post #125
zozbot234 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... 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…

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…

[deleted]

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

#129

Post by arjie »

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…

Oh that's a good shout. A friend did get one of these so I'll go take a look at it and see what it's like.

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

#130

Post by [deleted] »

jorvi wrote: post #112
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)…

[deleted]
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