Qualcomm Aiming For Snapdragon X Elite GPU Support In Linux 6.11

Qualcomm engineers on Sunday posted patches for enabling the Adreno X1-85 GPU within the MSM DRM driver. The Adreno X1-85 GPU is what's found within the Snapdragon X Elite SoC powering various new Windows ARM laptops although the Linux support continues maturing too for these platforms.

Qualcomm engineer Akhil Oommen posted the patches for the Adreno X1-85 GPU for enabling the accelerated graphics within the much anticipated Snapdragon X1 Elite SoC. Excitingly, the MSM DRM kernel driver patches confirm that with this code Mesa can already work with this GPU once having the necessary chip ID support added. Akhil noted:

"X1-85 has major focus on doubling core clock frequency and bandwidth throughput. It has a dedicated collapsible Graphics MX rail (gmxc) to power the memories and double the number of data channels to improve bandwidth to DDR.

Mesa has the necessary bits present already to support this GPU. We are able to bring up Gnome desktop by hardcoding "0xffff43050a01" as chipid. Also, verified glxgears and glmark2. We have plans to add the new chipid support to Mesa in next few weeks, but these patches can go in right away to get included in v6.11.

This series is rebased on top of v6.10-rc4. P3 cherry-picks cleanly on qcom/for-next."

While not yet queued, the hope is this kernel driver support for the Adreno X1-85 GPU will be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.11 merge window. This is good news for those wanting to use the Snapdragon X Elite under Linux. There were no comments on the current Adreno X1-85 GPU performance with MSM + Mesa or how it compares to Windows. For now this kernel graphics driver support can be found on the dri-devel mailing list.

This goes along with other Qualcomm efforts for supporting the Snapdragon X Elite under Linux. Besides all the ARM Windows laptops coming to market, TUXEDO Computers at least is working on a Linux laptop to come to market hopefully later in 2024.