Lenovo Flex 5G / Qualcomm SC8180x Support Being Worked On For Mainline Linux

[chithanh]

https://fudzilla.com/news/pc-hardwar...ful-arm-laptop

That looks interesting, hopefully we will see more of that.

In general, as the article mentions the x13s again, what's the current state of the linux port to that device? I know there's some kernel support but in a real world example what works and what does not?

I would not buy either the Dell or the Lenovo, the processor is obsolete crap. Only in 2024 there will be the 8cx Gen4 which is competitive and supports AV1 decode.

[tunnelblick]

I would not buy either the Dell or the Lenovo, the processor is obsolete crap. Only in 2024 there will be the 8cx Gen4 which is competitive and supports AV1 decode.

It always depends on what you need. If you want to have a silent machine for email and light web browsing, why not?

[t.s.]

I believe the fex-emu devs all use the X13 as their main platform.

What I'm wondering is why Qualcomm didn't upstream support for their X55 modem themselves?

Well, it's Qualcomm! Or you can say, almost all (if not all) ARM hardware manufacturer works like this: they just give you the blob. For at least 1 or 2 linux version.

[t.s.]

I would not buy either the Dell or the Lenovo, the processor is obsolete crap. Only in 2024 there will be the 8cx Gen4 which is competitive and supports AV1 decode.

I have other reasons not buying from them.

• Dell is notorious for limiting CPU speed or cut off the charging when you're not using their PSU.
• Lenovo likes to whitelisting their Wifi, WWAN card (in accordance to FCC maybe?) and proprietary power jack. So you have to source the cards from them, or go ebay route. Kinda understand why they do that: they're Chinese firms now, not like HP or Dell (US). Surely they don't want to have similar fate with Huawei.
• Now almost everything is soldered.

The least broken is HP. They just whitelisting the WWAN. But you still have non-whitelisted wifi card, and have two slot RAM.

[t.s.]

The Mac Book is different beast. You're guaranteed sales in millions and official Apple support (for the Mac platform) for 5+ years. Those devices will stick around for a long, long time and they will have a sizeable audience. Their performance is also in a different dimension compared to these Windows toys.

Just one major disadvantages: The storage is soldered down. You cannot swap or upgrade it. Typical of Apple.

[t.s.]

Okay, so according to you guys, the stupidity comes from:

1) The integrated chips are too integrated and can't perform minimal boot up if one don't get every niche part of them ready or tamed, unlike what we usually do in x86/x64 platform, i.e. leave those not-yet-supported driver-or-firmware-lacking modules or chips uninitialized and stay disabled, just boot up the parts we understand

2) The tight vertical integration from the smartphone era make manufacturers be habited of their lack of consistent backward compatible interface across each generation of chips. They did make sure they submitted enough stuff to Microsoft so that Windows can boot up in those new ARM-based Windows laptops. But since Windows are now "pre-installed", they don't need to care boot compatibility like the older days when users might buy a computer + a box copy of Windows, and require the Windows to be able to at least boot up, then install the drivers later.

My take:
1) Not a problem if they open the source code. But they choose not to. Mediatek is well-known to get-use-modify gpl code without credit and not contributing back.
2) Not because vertical integration, more because it's conditioned to one-time use thingies. They're hoping that you use the gadget, and when it's too slow or if there's something broken, you just discard it and buy a new one. Like smartphone. Like Macbook M1--M1 advantage is having longer supported duration and better built quality.

[robclark]

Hi, any elaboration on how come ARM-based computers can't get basic boot support out of the box?

They generally can, using ACPI and UEFI.. at least once basic SoC support is in place. That should get you basic input/output/storage/usb/efifb.. The need for devicetree for more advanced stuff is because linux doesn't support PEP (basically a SoC driver that understand the clock trees, power domains, and how to do interconnect and ddr scaling). (That is a slight oversimplification, there are a lot of various kernel frameworks that are heavily DT based, and would need some work to support ACPI, like on the display side the bridge/panel frameworks, but I guess there are others as well.)

Also, note that the apple laptops are also using DT.

Fwiw, I found out the other day that lenovo added a bios option to the x13s to load a dt to simplify the generic linux distro boot-flow.