this post was submitted on 15 May 2024

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Qualcomm goes where Apple won't, readies official Linux support for Snapdragon X Elite | Tom's Hardware (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Most of the functionality is present but many important bits are still being developed.

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[–] [email protected] 116 points 5 months ago (9 children)

One of the real downsides of ARM is, it seems, the relative lack of standardization. An x64 kernel? It'll run on most anything from the last ten years at least. And as for boot process, it's probably one of two options (and in many cases one computer can boot either legacy or EFI).

ARM, on the other hand...my raspberry pi collection does one thing, my Orange Pi does something else, and God help you if you want to try swapping the Orange kernel for the Raspberry (or vice versa)!

[–] [email protected] 59 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Arm:

Somehow, the kernel has been loaded and we have transferred control into it.

[–] possiblylinux127 23 points 5 months ago

But we still need a hundred blobs and if the kernel needs to do something it has to make a call to the firmware.

This is what we get when you use Broadcom

[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 months ago (2 children)

If the system is SystemReady then the EFI boot chain is fairly straightforward now. My current workstation just booted off the Debian usb installer like any other pc.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

Faith in standards temporarily restored

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

i'm glad to find out this exists.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

Somehow, the kernel returned. -Poe dameron

[–] [email protected] 53 points 5 months ago

A standard called SystemReady exists. For the systems that actually follow its standards, you can have a single ARM OS installation image that you copy to a USB drive and can then boot through UEFI and run with no problems on an Ampere server, an NXP device, an Nvidia Jetson system, and more.

Unfortunately it's a pretty new standard, only since 2020, and Qualcomm in particular is a major holdout who hasn't been using it.

Just like x86, you still need the OS to have drivers for the particular device you're installing on, but this standard at least lets you have a unified image, and many ARM vendors have been getting better about upstreaming open-source drivers in the Linux kernel.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 5 months ago (3 children)

I'm hoping RISC-V will start showing up in consumer products soon. Hopefully the first ones will be Linux laptops. Windows doesn't have RISC-V support yet, does it? This might be the opportunity for Linux to become the default for RISC-V.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Sad android already dropped RISC-V support

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Woah. Got a source for that?

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago (1 children)

https://hackaday.com/2024/05/03/google-removes-risc-v-support-from-android/

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago

Thanks for the link.

a potential reason might be the very fragmentary nature of the RISC-V ISA, which makes a standard RISC-V kernel very complicated if you want to support more than a (barebones) profile. This is also supported by a RISC-V mailing list thread, where ‘expensive maintenance’ is mentioned for why Google doesn’t want to support RISC-V.

That might change. It wouldn't be surprising if Google jumped back onto the train once RISC-V became popular again. But that might take a while.

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[–] possiblylinux127 5 points 5 months ago

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/riscv_support_android_pulled/?td=rt-3a

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

wouldn't risk-v be worse in terms of standardisation? At least for advanced functionality

[–] possiblylinux127 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Pine64 has a few Risc-V boards

[–] possiblylinux127 15 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (4 children)

I think a lot of the problem is how proprietary some of the hardware is. For instance, the Raspberry pi only runs the raspberry pi kernel which has a lot of proprietary blobs.

Meanwhile boards from Pine64 don't need proprietary software to boot. The achieve this by being selective with the hardware and hardware vendors.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

I mean, you can get the Pi to use EFI and just boot generic images.

[–] possiblylinux127 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It needs proprietary software to boot

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Most x86 EFIs are, so the comparison is not really fair.

[–] possiblylinux127 3 points 5 months ago

That is only sort of true. You don't need proprietary software on a live USB to boot x86. That's not the case with the Raspberry Pi as it boots from its GPU

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

“So far, Qualcomm has most of the critical functions working inside Linux, specifically version Linux 6.9 that was released not too long ago. These critical functions include UEFI-based boot support along with all the standard bootloaders like Grub and system-d.”

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[–] possiblylinux127 91 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

That is actually really good news

[–] [email protected] 45 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Any hardware vendor taking Linux support seriously is good news!

[–] possiblylinux127 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Which is most of them (Linux is great)

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Why is this surprising? Qualcomm releases Linux BSPs for all their mobile SoCs.

[–] possiblylinux127 13 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That's Android not mainline. You can't easily upstream the changes and you are stuck with a single kernel version.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

They regularly uplevel the kernel, and not all Android Linux code is inherently incompatible with mainline.

[–] possiblylinux127 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Tell that to my phone. Its possible some are worse than others but for Android devices the track level isn't good. Just check out the mainline status of PostmarketOS devices.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (13 children)

the age of the linux phone is approaching. People keeping saying it isn't they're wrong, i don't know why they think otherwise.

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