Linux 6.5 Adding Qualcomm Adreno 690 Open-Source GPU Support

The upcoming Linux 6.5 kernel is poised to add support for Qualcomm's Adreno 690 GPU to the open-source MSM kernel graphics/display driver. The A690 is notably used by the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 (SC8280XP) platform that in turn is what's found inside the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s laptop and other hardware.

The MSM Adreno Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver has queued up support for the Adreno A690 support with nearly 200 lines of code beyond what's found for the existing Adreno 600 series hardware support. The support was contributed via Linaro.

This Adreno A690 support was sent in as part of drm-msm-next this week with the MSM driver changes for DRM-Next to be queued for the upcoming Linux 6.5 kernel merge window. Again, making the Adreno 690 support exciting is that it's used by the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 / Lenovo ThinkPad X13s.

The ThinkPad X13s has been a popular target for ARM Linux enthusiasts and developers as a nicely-built laptop with decent specs. There's been upstream kernel work on it going back to last year and now with Linux 6.5 will even have the open-source MSM DRM driver support upstream.

The MSM driver updates for Linux 6.5 also include native HDMI output support in the DPU code, Adreno 610 speed binning support, Adreno 660 bindings, Adreno 610 GPU support, and a variety of other updates.