191–200 of 249 posts
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not all true. And Qualcomm taking over EL2 is optional now
What is not true? EL2 is still locked down for the chip this post is about, AFAIK. And everything else is is staying locked.
Lots of this is customer dependent but what you say is true for the typical android phone config that most use
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"
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Apple, whose FOSS support is reliant on volunteers reverse engineering their shit? This is much better than that. Not great yet, but much better than that in comparison.
Comparing the chips, not the software, Apple's chips are better than Qualcomm's. I agree Qualcomm's support of open source is better, while still leaving a lot to be desired.
That said, though, Apple can't be best for embedded applications, they're plainly not competing in that space - or can you make e.g. a custom ticket vending machine with an Apple chip?
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Tried postmarketOS yet?
I explored their site, but they only list supported devices, not supported CPUs, which leaves me guessing, whether their OS even works on this CPU. And since I don't really know that, it seems to be a lot of effort needed to use their tooling for non-supported devices, to make an installation image. Though I have not tried that yet. It only made me doubt, whether I could succeed that way.
Having basic SoC support doesn't mean you can just flash a kernel and expect the device to boot, though.
The tooling itself actually does most of the work for you. Things like compiling the kernel and building and flashing the install image pretty much happen automatically once you've copied over a template and edited the necessary sources.
You can probably boot pmOS if you copy a template for a device with the same CPU but if there are no similar devices, you're on your own. Even if it does boot, there's a good chance you end up in a "no display, no USB, no wireless, no sound" scenario where the kernel runs but won't be doing anything useful. Just having CPU support isn't enough, you'll probably need the appropriate device tree definitions and possibly kernel drivers which you may be able to lift from the Android kernel if your device came with that.
Very few Android SoCs have upstream support that even comes close to what the Apple M1 has, let alone an amd64 CPU. The new Snapdragon Extreme chips are very different in terms of design and in terms of how Qualcomm approaches them, and even their support is lacking in practice.
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What is not true? EL2 is still locked down for the chip this post is about, AFAIK. And everything else is is staying locked.
AFAIK Google runs their own EL3 on the Snapdragon Chromebooks. (And KVM at EL2) Lots of this is customer dependent but what you say is true for the typical android phone config that most use
It will be interesting to see what Google got from Qualcomm for the new Chromebooks (EL3 isn't even the highest level anymore, that's TME now).
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AFAIK Google runs their own EL3 on the Snapdragon Chromebooks. (And KVM at EL2) Lots of this is customer dependent but what you say is true for the typical android phone config that most use
The Snapdragon Chromebooks use older chips that didn't have the locked down boot-chain yet. Even if you didn't have the official EL3 unlock that Google got, you could still get into EL3 trivially if you wanted to. It will be interesting to see what Google got from Qualcomm for the new Chromebooks (EL3 isn't even the highest level anymore, that's TME now).
The new AL BSP target for Hamoa, which is what's going to ship on the new Android laptops, runs KVM at EL2 instead of Gunyah. But it has (at least partially) Qualcomm-owned EL3.
How does it compare to Apple ARM M series and did they slap on a decent GPU? If not, they still got a long way to go...
The problems seem rather similar, a while after release you need a dedicated build to actually get Linux working mostly right. Doesn't come close to the normal Linux experience. Then again, the X1 Extreme seems to have USB display and thunderbolt support, so they're better than Apple Silicon will probably ever be on Linux.
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> 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
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.
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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.
Those that are implemented have been very reliable in my experience, I think that labeling them “alpha-quality by Linux standards” is a ridiculous claim
even in the m1 there are 4 WIP in the support table, 2 TBA and 10 non mainline boxes for the M1 pro