Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Patches Already Surfacing For The Linux Kernel

It was just last week that Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 flagship SoC and thanks to their work with Linaro engineers, there are already patches under review for enabling this high-end Snapdragon chipset for the mainline Linux kernel.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 saw timely mainline Linux kernel support and now for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 it's very exciting that last week Linaro/Qualcomm engineers began posting patches already for review to work on the open-source, mainline support for this high-end SoC to appear in next-gen Android phones.

Of course, it's not entirely unexpected given Google/Android pushing for more mainline/upstream support and this building on a lot of foundational work over the years, but it's fabulous to see that within days of announcing the new platform that there is already mainline patches being publicly posted. It's far better than the times of vendor kernels and often significant periods of time before new SoCs were announced and seeing mainline support -- and still unfortunately that way for some SoC vendors.

Linaro this week published a blog post about their timely work on Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 enablement. The patches so far include supporting the Kryo CPU (including power management / DVFS), the system foundation support, low-speed I/O, high density storage, high speed peripherals like PCIe and USB, and the Qualcomm Hexagon bits for audio/sensors/compute/modem.

With these patches it's already possible to begin running the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP) on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 development platform.

Follow-up patches are expected soon to work out the display, audio, and modem functionality. And before too long all of these patches should work their way to the mainline kernel.