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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

#211

Post by neobrain »

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?

Just in case anyone's tempted to buy one of these now: Support is alright after heroic (and continuing) efforts to improve platform support, but it's flaky. M1/M2 devices offer better performance and the state of Asahi drivers is much better, particularly around audio.

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

#212

Post by vladms »

Voultapher wrote: post #206
vladms wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It would be great if we could engineer our way out of this situation, but we can't. For many years I strongly believed in our cleverness, after all I was clever and in the narrow domain I worked in - tech - cleverness was enough to overcome most issues. So why not human climate change? In Tom Murphy's words: > Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass ext…

> It would be great if we could engineer our way out of this situation, but we can't.

I think it would be much more honest to say we don't know so we shouldn't bet everything on one approach.

Humans care about survival and will impact the world. It is exactly what all other animals do, and there is a dynamic equilibrium: too many predators => reduced prey => less predators. I don't think it's fair to think we humans are special. Or should we blame the algae for one of the previous mass extinctions?

I do think it is reasonable to take more care about the environment (co2, pollution, etc.) than we do because we need it in order to live well (not because I just want a nice Earth). I think most people agree with that, and are slowly adapting. Will see if fast enough.

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

#213

Post by jorvi »

theragra wrote: post #202
jorvi wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)…

Are you sure? I've recently watched a video where presenter mentioned how Lunar Lake based laptops are better then any Snapdragon. For example https://www.pcworld.com/article/2463714/tested-intels-lunar-...

Well, in your article it already clearly states performance tanks as soon as you go on battery. By 20-40%..

On another very reputable Dutch site, you can see the Snapdragon consistently lead the Lunar Lake laptop, and that's with Lunar Lake set to maximum performance[0]

There is also a general logic to it: Apple M-series still handily beat anything Intel has, and Qualcomm's Snapdragons beat the M-series they follow up.

Maybe Intel can truly push x86 to unseen heights, who knows? There's nothing technically stopping them but so far it hasn't beared out. Similar with Nvidia, their RTX 3090 power limited at 340W got beat by an M1 maxed out at 120W. Why isn't the RTX 4090 or 5090 half the TDP?

[0]https://tweakers.net/reviews/12482/lichte-krachtpatser-met-l...

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

#214

Post by keybored »

beeflet wrote: post #164
Voultapher wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The slow AIs are driven by consumer behavior. Paperclip optimizers die pretty quickly without demand for paperclips. The inputs and the outputs of the AI are always human-facing, so the goals vaguely resemble human values (even if the values are greed).

Corporate propaganda is driven by consumer-blaming.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44335953

What gets to the top of the feed? Organic, rational arguments or the arguments with enough money behind them? Economics explains it, again.

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

#215

Post by Voultapher »

vladms wrote: post #212
Voultapher wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be great if we could engineer our way out of this situation, but we can't. For many years I strongly believed in our cleverness, after all I was clever and in the narrow domain I worked in - tech - cleverness was enough to overcome most issues. So why not human climate change? In Tom Murphy's words: > Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass ext…

> It would be great if we could engineer our way out of this situation, but we can't. I think it would be much more honest to say we don't know so we shouldn't bet everything on one approach. Humans care about survival and will impact the world. It is exactly what all other animals do, and there is a dynamic equilibrium: too many predators => reduced prey => less predators. I don't think it's fair to think we humans…

Our viewpoints don't seem that far apart and thanks for the nuanced take. Personally I believe we know that technology can't fix this by definition because the problem is of social, cultural and economic nature. Our lifestyles are woefully incompatible with a 100k year horizon, even a 100 year horizon in many areas. Our perception of wealth depends on never ending growth, our welfare systems depend on never ending growth, our economies depend on never ending growth. It seems implausible to the point of impossibility that our economies can grow forever [1]. Technology is good at reaching goals e.g. going to the moon is unlikely without science and technology. But in this case the problem is the goal itself. Technology won't motivate us to let go of our conveniences.

[1] https://tmurphy.physics.ucsd.edu/papers/limits-econ-final.pd...

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

#216

Post by zamadatix »

prmoustache wrote: post #142
zamadatix wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's second class on Windows because it doesn't support game DRM and generally performs worse for the price than an x86 laptop. About the thing it really has going for it is better battery life. Using Linux doesn't really change either of those problems, though it does get you away from the mess that is Windows 11. 1st party native software support is high and 3rd party native software support is higher than Linux. B…

10y old laptops are still powerful enough for my usage. So a bit more battery life wouldn't hurt me if performance of an arm system provides at least as much in term of performance. I am pretty sure 99% of the population is in the same situation.

The situation was 99% of Windows laptops sold ended up being the much cheaper x86 ones or similarly priced ones with more performance.

It's like phones where people say everyone will buy out any phone with more battery life and then the standard type phone is always actually what sells. Consumers will gladly pick more battery all else equal, but that's not what the snapdragon laptops have been.

Not that Apple gave consumers much choice, but when they switched over it was truly all else equal or better and it sold like hot cakes, despite many popular still needing emulation for the first year they still ran better than they would have natively in the other option anyways. Qualcomm doesn't get that nearly as easily because they are competing against the latest off all current x86 options, not a subset of older Intel options.

I'm hoping that changes with the newer Elites though. At least the performance seems to be getting there, if not the price yet.

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

#217

Post by eigenspace »

TiredOfLife wrote: post #208
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #147

Qualcomm did this in 2024. They pushed some patches to LKML, and issued a press release to brag about it. ( https://www.qualcomm.com/developer/blog/2024/05/upstreaming-... ) 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... ). In particular, the long battery runtimes – usually one of the strong arguments for…

Isn't Tuxedo jus a white label reseller?

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.

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

#218

Post by tecleandor »

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…

And, any other options or recommendations if I don't need the huge GPU?

Seems like the middle ground between SBCs and huge servers is a bit underserved in ARM...

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

#219

Post by bayindirh »

TheDong wrote: post #167
DeathArrow wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yet 2 days ago, Tuxedo Computers announced they were abandoning Qualcomm due to crap support. ( Does Apple offer better support? Qualcomm offers commercial support. I guess Tuuxedo Computers didn't pay for the support?

Apple is a non-sequitur. Tuuxedo is giving up on Qualcomm in favor of AMD and Intel. 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.

Apple doesn't actively lock and act hostile towards the reverse engineering folks. They just do their thing and sometimes do small jests to allow these folks to boot anything they want and play with the hardware.

...and while they're standing away from GPL stuff, they do have a dedicated site for Open Source software: https://opensource.apple.com/

Go to releases, and see what they do there.

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

#220

Post by walletdrainer »

pjmlp wrote: post #204
TreeInBuxton wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The very first they got wrong is how hard it is to buy Dell XPS with Linux on most European countries. Naturally nowhere to be found on PC stores, and online I never found it on sale in the Dell store.

Why would you want to do that anyway?
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