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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

#171

Post by my123 »

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…

> And don't even get me started on Gunyah and

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

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

#172

Post by a-dub »

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…

it makes some sense for embedded stuff, linux is only continuing to gain ground there.

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.

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

#173

Post by my123 »

flto wrote: post #141
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 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.

not all true. And Qualcomm taking over EL2 is optional now

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

#174

Post by my123 »

Keyframe wrote: post #116
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…

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?

Fedora boots ootb

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

#175

Post by my123 »

floatboth wrote: post #151
aseipp wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original Oryon systems allowed you to boot directly into EL2 and skip Gunyah via BIOS settings. I assume this will be the same.

Which ones, where? On X1 laptops that shipped with Windows, you can only escape into EL2 via Secure Launch: https://github.com/TravMurav/slbounce

Didn't ship externally/OEMs didn't take it, but the CRDs had the option.

The prototype impl at the time broke some Windows functionality

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

#176

Post by my123 »

E39M5S62 wrote: post #97
peppersghost93 wrote: post #66

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?

See qebspil for filling the gap for the EL2 side

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

#177

Post by my123 »

floatboth wrote: post #146
cmxch wrote: post #108

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.

EL2 is coming by default on Glymur (X2E) (yaaaay), can be enabled in config on some IoT platforms, and can be booted into via Secure Launch on previous compute platforms (Hamoa/Purwa aka X1E/X1P, SC8280XP), search for slbounce. On phone platforms.. probably not? Or Android might want it for pKVM..

_Current_ phone platforms still use Gunyah.

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

#178

Post by ryukoposting »

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…

Thanks for the constructive framing. My gut reaction was "great job, you're doing the minimum"

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

#179

Post by nrclark »

my123 wrote: post #171
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…

> And don't even get me started on Gunyah and 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

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.

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

#180

Post by ryukoposting »

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…

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.
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