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

82 points

by mfilion

1 hour ago

| past

| 13 comments

| qualcomm.com

| HN

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kop316

58 minutes ago

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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... .

- Likewise, Mobile SoCs are completely dependent on Android without proper upstreaming (which they haven't done in the past).

- They are seeing Valve spending time and money on FOSS support paying off, especially with their new hardware releases.

On the other hand, proper upstreaming of the chips give them much more flexibility for different linux-based OSes.

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hypercube33

39 minutes ago

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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 will say with my 8 gen 3 snapdragon I'm impressed and also disappointed - stupid thing needs active cooling and I'm pretty sure it's bad enough that it's desoldered or damaged the core or something from heat but also you can't get driver updates for the GPU if you wanted because Qualcomm be the way it do.

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zamadatix

29 minutes ago

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It'll probably be as much of a second class citizen elsewhere (the real problem is the hardware hasn't as good as Apple Silicon laptops but has been in the same price class at the bottom) but it's good they chase everywhere rather than just one use case.

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alganet

50 minutes ago

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A businesss decision would be great. What would suck would be a marketing decision.

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arjie

42 minutes ago

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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).

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jabedude

29 minutes ago

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Does this actually translate into any kind of probability of a manufacturer making a device with this chip?

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modeless

1 hour ago

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Has Qualcomm seen the light after working with Valve on Steam Frame? The news that Steam Frame would be running an open source Adreno GPU driver really caught me by surprise.

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daemonologist

41 minutes ago

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My impression from the emulation folks is that the proprietary drivers are chock full of problems. I suspect it was open source drivers or nothing (i.e., back to an AMD x86 solution like the Steam Deck).

(And I don't think Qualcomm has seen the light - my understanding is that the Turnip drivers are purely reverse engineered.)

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jeroenhd

49 minutes ago

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They've been working on better mainline Linux support for a while now, but their last generation is still catching up on the driver side of things.

I hope they succeed but the last generation has only recently become mostly usable for specific distros. General support may take a while.

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bsimpson

51 minutes ago

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I just checked: Frame is Gen 3 and the article is Gen 5.

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ff2400t

24 minutes ago

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The frame uses X Elite, their SoC designed or Laptops. These drivers are for mobile Line. Yeah the naming can be quite confusing.

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TiredOfLife

1 minute ago

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the frame is using a standard mobile snapdragon 8 gen 3 with ARM designed cortex cores.

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RobotToaster

54 minutes ago

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It wouldn't surprise me if they're full of binary blobs

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jsheard

48 minutes ago

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They are, but that's hardly unique to Qualcomm. Tons of hardware with "proper" upstream Linux drivers still requires closed-source firmware blobs, and in particular with anything wireless that's probably an unwinnable battle due to regulatory constraints.

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saidinesh5

8 minutes ago

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Closed source firmware is one thing that actually runs outside the Linux system... but there's also the user space libraries that are needed to interact with the drivers (eg libgl etc... or the vendor partition in most Android phones)

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sylens

4 minutes ago

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I’d like to see the chips powering the new Surface devices in a Framework laptop at some point. Feel like they would be perfect for the Framework 12

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freehorse

1 hour ago

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I wish this signup box did not cover the text, or at least there was some way to close/remove it.

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webdevver

26 minutes ago

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yeah i had to inspect element and delete the html node. theres a double-space in the first line of the top summary section.

presentation is half the message!

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1 hour ago

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Does that mean that one will be able to purchase tablets with this chip and replace the OS with Linux?

That would be great. As far as I know, there currently are no options for lightweight tablets that support Linux.

Not sure how well WSL2 on tablets work. Does anybody here have experiences with WSL2 on tablets like the new Microsoft Surface Pro that uses the Snapdragon X Elite chip?

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jsheard

1 hour ago

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https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/how-well-does-w...

Apparently WSL2 does work, it pulls a native ARM64 Linux distro and then proceeds as usual.

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hypercube33

37 minutes ago

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I have the 8 gen 3 and wsl and hyperv work fine just can't really use x86 binaries / containers / operating systems.

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jsheard

32 minutes ago

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I think the performance of x86 VMs would be pretty poor anyway due to the high overhead of TSO emulation. Windows ARM doesn't have the benefit of hardware assistance like macOS does, and the tricks that Microsoft came up with to mitigate the impact rely on metadata that only MSVC emits, so anything compiled with GCC or LLVM would always hit their emulators slow path.

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conradev

58 minutes ago

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The Linux support on the X1E today is lacking. I’m much more optimistic for the X2E.

The hardware is great, though, I love the 12” Surface with the X1E. WSL2 works great!

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throwaway173738

1 hour ago

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I really hope this is the case because I’d love to have an arm64 laptop for work. Then binaries in my laptop will work on my embedded systems, generally.

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summa_tech

12 minutes ago

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Does KVM hypervisor work? Previous Qualcomm CPUs have locked hypervisor mode behind Qualcomm proprietary blobs, and only allowed HyperV to use it - this was definitely the case for WOS laptops.

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walterbell

1 minute ago

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[delayed]

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wmf

32 minutes ago

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Can you buy this chip or is it only for Android phones? They have bad support for what you can buy (X Elite) but now they're touting upstreaming the chip you can't buy?

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imcritic

1 hour ago

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This is cancer.

Error 1009 Ray ID: 9a531bef5ba0e988 • 2025-11-27 16:47:44 UTC Access denied What happened? The owner of this website (www.qualcomm.com) has banned the country or region your IP address is in (RU) from accessing this website.

Please see https://developers.cloudflare.com/support/troubleshooting/ht... for more details.

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micw

1 hour ago

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I'd say collateral damage. Blame the guy who makes war.

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imcritic

1 hour ago

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This makes no sense. Just imagine you would get handcuffed tomorrow. Collateral damage. Blame some guy. Or a gal.

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cuu508

44 minutes ago

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This is the price of living in a country that starts wars of aggression.

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ronsor

40 minutes ago

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Man, if only it were so easy to leave a country that starts wars. It's not as if the average citizen has little control over that or anything.

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boredatoms

6 minutes ago

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The price is that of a VPN subscription

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IshKebab

37 minutes ago

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I'd be glad it's just handcuffs and not a bomb dropping on my head.

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doublerabbit

33 minutes ago

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/shrug. Try being from the UK, we don't even get imgur.

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ddtaylor

1 hour ago

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Because other people do bad things these people aren't allowed to share ideas.

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coffinbirth

1 hour ago

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Trump? Biden? Obama? Bush? Clinton? Who do you mean?

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remix2000

31 minutes ago

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No no, you see, American war brings peace and Russian war brings despair.

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mathfailure

48 minutes ago

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Does it even matter with such a logic?

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sl-1

51 minutes ago

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Probably Vladimir Putin and his cronies.

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mathfailure

47 minutes ago

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Or any american president and his cronies. Or Pyotr Poroschenko and his cronies. Or Vladimir Zelensky and his cronies.

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neskorodev

27 minutes ago

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Gtfo.

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ddtaylor

1 hour ago

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I tried to get it on archive.is but it say in a loop forever.

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fainpul

1 hour ago

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Even when it's not blocked, the layout is broken...

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miyuru

1 hour ago

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> Hardware-accelerated video playback of H.264 (AVC), H.265 (HEVC) and VP9 video streams

> Hardware-accelerated video recording into H.264 (AVC) and H.265 (HEVC) formats

no mention of AV1? Surprised since most websites including YT uses it heavily.

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jeroenhd

57 minutes ago

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The Qualcomm marketing spec sheet mentions AV1 decoding: https://www.qualcomm.com/content/dam/qcomm-martech/dm-assets...

Maybe that part of the driver isn't finished yet?

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saagarjha

56 minutes ago

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Or licensed.

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jsheard

55 minutes ago

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Isn't the whole point of AV1 that it's royalty free, as opposed to H264/265/etc?

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ZeroCool2u

40 minutes ago

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Yeah, and the main problem with HEVC/H265 is the patent encumbrance. Very odd, but hopefully it's just coming a bit later.

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saagarjha

42 minutes ago

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For the codec, sure. But there can always be more restrictions on the IP block, driver code, etc.

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jeroenhd

47 minutes ago

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AV1 is designed to be license free, so unless they outsourced their driver development to another company I don't think there's anything to license.

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ori_b

1 hour ago

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I appreciate the gesture, but... just release the docs!

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tensegrist

48 minutes ago

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the year of linux on the arm desktop cannot come soon enough

also, not to beat a horse that is by now six feet under, but

> No delays, no hurry-up-and-wait, no registration. Just go get the new features.

i'm so tired

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jjtheblunt

36 minutes ago

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i'm using Linux just fine on an ARM desktop for a long time, via Apple Silicon hypervisor enabled via the UTM macos app (which wraps both Qemu, which i don't use, and Apple Silicon hypervisor, which i do use, configurable when instantiating a new image from an iso).

i mention this because perhaps you'd like it too. in my case fedora 43 works just fine, and fast.

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jama211

7 minutes ago

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Ooh, thank you for this, I might try it on my m4 mac. Any tips or anything I should be aware of?

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E39M5S62

29 minutes ago

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Eh. The CPU might be supported in Linux, but all of the rest of the hardware to make a laptop is left dangling in the wind. Look at the X1E laptops to see how far "upstream Linux support for a CPU" gets you.

They aren't targeting enthusiasts with this announcement.