Qualcomm has provided an update on how it is working to ensure steady support for Linux for its Snapdragon X Elite SKUs.
Qualcomm Starts To Facilitate The Linux Community Early-On, Providing An Environment For Enablement
[Press Release]: The Snapdragon X Elite system on chip (SoC) has been garnering attention for its remarkable performance in Windows on Arm PCs. At the same time, we’ve kept our eye on Linux. We’ve been keeping up our traditional efforts to make it easier to boot Linux on Arm-based PCs by upstreaming a consistent flow of patch sets for the Linux kernel.
In this post, I’ll describe our track record in supporting Linux on laptops with Windows on Snapdragon and how that continues with the Snapdragon X Elite. You’ll see what’s already merged in the mainline Linux kernel, what’s pending, and what’s on our roadmap. (This is a summary of our presentation “Linux with Upstream Kernel
On Snapdragon X Elite Compute Platform” at Embedded Open Source Summit. See below for details and links.)
SoCs with Windows on Snapdragon, with consistent Linux support
Collaborating with Lenovo, Arm, and Linaro on the AArch64 laptops GitHub project, we’ve built Linux support into several generations of our SoCs with Windows on Snapdragon. We’ve ensured that you can boot Linux on many of the laptops powered by our previous generation of SoCs. Notable models include the Lenovo Yoga C630 (Snapdragon 850), the Lenovo Flex 5G (Snapdragon 8cx Gen 1), and the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s (Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3).
It’s been our priority not only to support Linux on our premium-tier SoCs but to support it pronto. In fact, within one or two days of publicly announcing each generation of Snapdragon 8, we’ve posted the initial patch set for Linux kernel support. Snapdragon X Elite was no exception: we announced it on October 23 of last year and posted the patchset the next day. That was the result of a lot of pre-announcement work to get everything up and running on Linux and Debian.
The Snapdragon X Elite is built around custom Qualcomm CPUs called Qualcomm Oryon, with 12 cores, a clock speed of up to 3.8 GHz, and a single- and dual-core boost up to 4.3 GHz. Its Qualcomm Adreno GPU offers up to 4.6 TFLOPs and its neural processing unit (NPU) delivers 45 TOPs for AI workloads. The SoC has received high marks for performance from reviewers like The Register, Tom’s Guide, Digital Trends, Gizmochina, and thurrott.com.
Boot Firmware
The boot stack on Snapdragon X Elite supports standard UEFI-based boot. Linux boots up using device trees, and all standard bootloaders, including Grub and system-d boot, should just work out of the box. We use Grub to boot into Debian, and to dual-boot Windows and Debian.
We’re working closely with upstream communities on an open problem with the UEFI-based BIOS while booting with devices. The problem is that when you have more than one device tree blob (DTB) packed into the firmware package flashed on the device, there is no standard way of selecting a device tree to pass on to the kernel. OEMs commonly put multiple DTBs into the firmware package so it will support devices with slightly different SKUs, so we’re keen to solve this problem. (See the Embedded Open Source Summit presentation on this topic by my colleague Elliot Berman. Links below.)
The image below depicts the boot flow of Linux on this SoC:
In short, our roadmap for the next six months includes work in these areas:
- End-to-end hardware video decoding, on Firefox and Chrome
- Implementation of the libcamera-SoftISP camera solution
- GPU and CPU performance optimizations
- Power optimizations (Suspend/DCVS)
- Making our firmware openly available (in Linux-firmware)
- Access to easy installers (Ubuntu and Debian)
[Journalist Note]: It's certainly exciting to see Qualcomm contributing its efforts towards ensuring complete enablement on Linux, despite the Snapdragon X Elite SKUs being relatively much newer to modern-day alternatives. Moreover, Qualcomm themselves have invited developers and consumers to contribute their work towards support in multiple areas such as display, GPU, video, audio, camera, and power management, and with that, the Snapdragon X Elite lineup has begun its journey at Linux.
News Source: Qualcomm
