Qualcomm Hardware Support Increasingly In Good Shape On The Mainline Linux Kernel

After years of work by Qualcomm and Linaro engineers, the Qualcomm SoC support on the mainline Linux kernel has finally matured enough that new hardware support tends to come rather quickly and be well supported. With the forthcoming Linux 6.8 kernel the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 can boot on the mainline kernel, the Snapdragon-powered ThinkPad X13s has been popular with Linux developers thanks to the upstream support, and other Qualcomm-powered devices tending to play more nicely with upstream Linux these days rather than having to resort to vendor kernel builds.

Neil Armstrong with Linaro presented at FOSDEM 2024 last week in Brussels around the mainline support on Qualcomm SoCs. Armstrong noted all the work over the past decade on Qualcomm support and ultimately how with Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 they reached the point of upstream support in just two months after the public Qualcomm announcement of the platform.

With the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 on Linux 6.8 there is working display, USB-C, USB / PCIe / Bluetooth, CPU frequency scaling, suspend/resume and even crypto accelerator support. But still a work-in-progress is audio support, DP Alt-Mode, enabling the DSPs, USB-C power delivery, and GPU acceleration.

The Lenovo ThinkPad X13s was also talked about for its generally great support. Plus various Linux distributions running easily on this ARM laptop.

Learn more about the Qualcomm hardware state on the mainline Linux kernel via Neil Armstrong's FOSDEM presentation. The video recording and slide deck are available on FOSDEM.org.