Independent Developers Tackling Snapdragon 630/660 SoC Support For The Upstream Linux Kernel

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 660 is approaching four years old and the Snapdragon 630 a bit younger than that, but these mobile phone SoCs may soon find renewed life on the upstream Linux kernel thanks to the work of community developers.

SoMainline developers that work to upstream Sony Xperia device support for Linux sent out a large set of patches this weekend in hopes of upstreaming the SDM630 and SDM660 SoC support. In turn this would allow more mid-range mobile phone devices based on these Qualcomm SoCs to potentially see renewed life on the mainline Linux kernel.

The patches sent out on Saturday by AngeloGioacchino Del Regno cover the many different subsystems for bringing up the SDM630/SDM660 including in the process bringing up the likes of the Adreno 508/509/512 graphics for the MSM DRM driver. The patches also include related work like introducing the Novatek NT36xxx touchscreen driver.

The Snapdragon 630 is powered by eight Cortex-A53 cores and an Adreno 508 GPU. The Snapdragon 660 meanwhile has eight Kryo 260 cores and Adreno 512 graphics, making these decent 2017 mid-range SoCs. Check out these patches if you are interested in the possibility of running a Snapdragon 630/660 device on the mainline Linux kernel possibly in the near future.