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

https://www.qualcomm.com/developer/blog/2025/10/same-day-snapdragon-8-elite-gen-5-upstream-linux-support

76•mfilion•1h ago

Comments

imcritic•1h ago

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.

micw•1h ago

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

ddtaylor•1h ago

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

imcritic•58m ago

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

cuu508•41m ago

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

ronsor•37m ago

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.

boredatoms•3m ago

The price is that of a VPN subscription

steven_pareto•3m ago

Ah yeah because the whole Western world doesn’t do that, right?

IshKebab•34m ago

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

doublerabbit•30m ago

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

coffinbirth•56m ago

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

sl-1•48m ago

Probably Vladimir Putin and his cronies.

mathfailure•43m ago

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

neskorodev•24m ago

Gtfo.

mathfailure•44m ago

Does it even matter with such a logic?

remix2000•28m ago

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

fainpul•1h ago

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

ddtaylor•1h ago

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

ori_b•1h ago

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

modeless•1h ago

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.

RobotToaster•50m ago

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

jsheard•44m ago

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.

saidinesh5•4m ago

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)

bsimpson•48m ago

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

ff2400t•20m ago

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

jeroenhd•46m ago

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.

daemonologist•38m ago

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.)

freehorse•1h ago

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

webdevver•23m ago

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!

mg•1h ago

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?

throwaway173738•1h ago

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.

jsheard•57m ago

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.

conradev•55m ago

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!

hypercube33•34m ago

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

jsheard•28m ago

I think the performance of x86 VMs would be pretty poor anyway due to the 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.

miyuru•58m ago

> 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.

jeroenhd•54m ago

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?

saagarjha•53m ago

Or licensed.

jsheard•52m ago

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

saagarjha•39m ago

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

ZeroCool2u•36m ago

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

jeroenhd•44m ago

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.

kop316•55m ago

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.

alganet•46m ago

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

hypercube33•35m ago

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.

zamadatix•26m ago

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.

tensegrist•44m ago

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

jjtheblunt•33m ago

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.

jama211•4m ago

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

arjie•38m ago

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).

jabedude•26m ago

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

walterbell•4m ago

[delayed]

wmf•29m ago

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?

E39M5S62•26m ago

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.

summa_tech•9m ago

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.