Qualcomm, yesterday, promising Linux support for the new Snapdragon X2 processors:
Linux on Snapdragon X2 Series is moving from early bring-up toward a more complete upstream developer experience. Core support is landing, Hexagon NPU and Adreno GPU work is progressing, and real laptops with Snapdragon X2 Series processors are already beginning to boot Linux.
↫ Qualcomm’s promises from 2026
Interesting, but I feel like I’ve heard these exact words before. Qualcomm, two years ago, promising Linux support for the then-new Snapdragon X processors:
It’s been our priority not only to support Linux on our premium-tier SoCs, but to support it pronto. In fact, within one or two days of publicly announcing each generation of Snapdragon 8, we’ve posted the initial patchset for Linux kernel support. Snapdragon X Elite was no exception: we announced on October 23 of last year and posted the patchset the next day. That was the result of a lot of pre-announcement work to get everything up and running on Linux and Debian.
↫ Qualcomm’s empty promises from 2024
These promises were not at all kept. Two years later, Linux support for Snapdragon X laptops is still spotty, broken, and limited, confined to just a few bespoke Ubuntu builds, which don’t even offer full support either. It’s a complete mess, effectively unusable, and highlights once again that big technology companies are compulsive liars. I have little faith in these new promises, but who knows – maybe this time it’ll be different.
Probably not, though.
A lot of the problems seem to come down to Device Trees and the way those boards need to be added to linux. People have criticised ACPI for being shit and i am not gonna defend it on a technical level but its dynamic device mapping is what solves these problems. Similarly UEFI is far from perfect but it as an overall all spec blows the standard arm and riscv bootloader stuff out of the water. The newest arm server stuff does mandate uefi but until that comes to arm laptops or phones we’re going to continue to have so many of these small little problems getting these devices to a state where anyone can just download a generic image to install
Technically, the ARM SystemReady spec already mandates UEFI and ACPI for desktops and laptops.
https://support.arm.com/documentation/107981/0305/SystemReady-Program—General-FAQ/What-is-the-BBR-?lang=en
That is not the road the X Elite universe has gone down though.
Decades ago I was bright eyed and optimistic about ARM. I would have loved for ARM to pan out like x86 where virtually all consumer hardware follow a common standard, Anything’s technically possible and ARM manufacturers could come together if only they had the will to cooperate, but they have such a bad track record. In the words of George Bush:, who I believe was speaking at tech convention in Tennessee, had this to say of ARM:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hl7FKfl3O2Y
“premium-tier” So they’ll try charging over a thousand dollars for the Windows on ARM experience again, then abandon this Linux promise after it inevitably doesn’t sell well a second time, and perhaps a 4th and 5th time.
They’re never going to do well if they’re primarily promoting windows on arm… There’s very little native software, the userland emulation overhead eliminates most of the benefits and drivers can’t be emulated so you have poor third party hardware compatibility and anything else that uses a kernel driver.
Apple have the control advantage – it was obvious that all macs were going to ARM, so developers had no choice but to support it. With windows they can easily ignore the <1% of ARM users with no consequences.
A windows/arm laptop has clear disadvantages next to x64 laptops… A linux/arm laptop has significantly less. Shipping laptops with android or chromeos is also likely to work a lot better than windows.
They could do well, they just have to admit to themselves that it will never be a luxury, $1000+ experience. The point is, their Linux support is entirely dependent on if Windows on ARM machines sell well. When it flops again, they’ll break their Linux promise again.
Why should we care about Qualcomm and their broken promises ? Isn’t there any other CPU provider with better track record into Linux support and throw them our money instead ? Sure, perhaps not as powerful as Qualcomm’s CPU, but at least with real Linux support.
https://github.com/rockchip-linux
LOL. That was funny. The answer is no.
Second, Rockchip sucks even more. Third, they target embedded devices and IoT, not desktops.
The other options are worse.
Much better then nothing at all, still it likely makes sense for Qualcomm to commit fully and upstream Snapdragon X support now if for whatever reason they decided not to do that with X2 just yet. To make the experience for Snapdragon X hardware top notch out of the box. Mostly to see first hand on what benefits them the most in terms of drivers for their hardware. And maybe to realize it makes sense to have full upstream support for their future hardware before it’s even released.
As I have said before, it is important to differentiate between support for Snapdragon X Elite the chip and full support for any given laptop based on it.
Not to defend Qualcomm specifically (because I do not love them) but the original Snapdragon X Elite SoC itself is decently supported in Linux, including GPU. The issue is more the laptop makers. Lenovo has up-streamed their firmware, device drivers, and device trees but others have not. You can fault Qualcomm for not better coordinating the end-user device support of course.
Ironically, support for the Tuxedo laptop is in the kernel mainline but that device never shipped as Tuxedo was not happy with battery life. Power management and fan control on Linux are not great which we can blame on Qualcomm.
The biggest pain point is that, like Apple laptops, the X Elite laptops rely on device trees instead of something like ACPI for device discovery. That means that the device tree has to be in the kernel and, as above, not all device makers submit their device trees to the Linux mainline. And they do not submit their firmware either. Even if the SoC itself was supported perfectly, any given laptop can have spotty support or no support at all. For Apple laptops, the Asahi project takes care of this of course and there are not that many Apple Silicon devices. For X Elite PCs, each laptop vendor has to do this work themselves.
The situation will probably be much the same for X2 Elite. Qualcomm may get support into Linux for the SoC. Perhaps better support then the original X Elite. But device trees for any given device along with drivers and firmware will still be a vendor by vendor hodge-podge. Qualcomm does not seem to have much interest in being the driving force behind ensuring quality Linux support at the end-user device level. And I think, strategically, the individual laptop makers are just much more focused on Windows.
As a RISC-V fan, I am happy to see Qualcomm squander their lead here. RISC-V needs another year or two to release chips that could support a laptop ecosystem. The RISC-V world is much more likely to lead with Linux first and for Windows to come later (if ever) and so perhaps the Linux experience will see more polish. Of course, the timing on this remains uncertain. RISC-V chips powerful enough will come out over the next 6 – 24 months, but most of them will be focused on servers. RISC-V laptops are likley to remain a developer-centric option for a while.
By now i feel they all involved understand Windows on ARM is a dead end and GNU/Linux is the key player. As for the rest, Snapdragon X2, the promise is better support by Qualcomm and vendors like Asus and HP. As we speak Qualcomm engineers are upstreaming new driver for ASUS Zenbook A14 and A16. Fan speeds, thermal, suspend … So overall the situation is improving drastically.
> i feel they all involved understand Windows on ARM is a dead end and GNU/Linux is the key player.
Do you think so? That would be great.
Windows on ARM has not taken over the world. I think market-share is about 5%. But the software ecosystem has been ok. Do you mean it is a dead-end market share wise or technically? Because, my impression is that most X Elite laptops are running Windows and not Linux. I do not have the numbers though.
But Linux itself is the niche desktop option. A strategy to make X Elite a mainstream alternative to Intel would be based around Windows and taking share away not just from AMD/Intel but from Apple Silicon as well.
I am not criticizing Linux. It has been my preferred desktop for decades. But I am still in the minority for sure.
Windows is too rigid, to provide anything beyond promises for ARM and Windows users won’t ever chose ARM over “Wintel”. As you are a RISC-V fan, there situation is even more aligned with GNU/Linux, Windows isn’t even a target. ACPI already supported. Note that Snapdragons currently already use hybrid approach, when it comes to devices trees vs ACPI. I am rather sure that we are not that far away on where ARM will reach ACPI support on GNU/Linux too. In the end they have to, or RISC-V will beat them.
@Geck
There are already RISC-V laptops that are well supported in Linux:
https://deepcomputing.io/dc-roma-risc-v-mainboard-iii-unveiled-at-fosdem-powered-by-spacemit-k3-for-framework-laptop-13/
These platforms are “usable” if you are a developer and want to dogfood the ecosystem but they are slower than the laptops most people use today. These are still developer devices. And while the RISC-V server spec mandates ACPI, these laptops are still using device trees.
A windows/arm device has clear downsides compared to an x64 device – third party drivers will almost never work, most software will run under emulation resulting in lower performance and increased resource consumption. For linux there is very little downside next to an x64 option.
There is also chromeos, and the forthcoming laptop android – these platforms are also much better suited to arm devices than windows, for instance almost all android software will run natively on arm.
Exactly, on top of all that we can easily add mobile. Plus the time has come for GNU/Linux on desktop to make it to mainstream and not some gimmick from Google or similar.
You are missing the fact that ARM laptops regularly get double the battery life of x64 ones, even when running emulated software. There are plenty of users willing to take a small performance hit in order to gain battery life.
Thank you to LeFantome for the ARM SystemReady spec:
https://support.arm.com/documentation/107981/0305/SystemReady-Program—General-FAQ/What-is-the-BBR-?lang=en
I understand ARM is recommending the SBBR recipe: PSCI, SMCCC, UEFI, ACPI, SMBIOS
It can’t be that difficult to build laptop/desktop computers that follow those 5 standards!
I thought that ARM licenses the Instruction Set to CPU Manufacturers. Why doesn’t ARM make it a condition of the license that the CPU Manufacturer is not allowed to sell the CPUs to any hardware manufacturer unless the hardware manufacturer certifies the laptop/desktop implements the 5 standards PSCI, SMCCC, UEFI, ACPI, SMBIOS????
ARM actually does that in server space, for GNU/Linux, and Microsoft is doing that in consumer space, due to having leverage. Historically speaking GNU/Linux on desktop didn’t have any leverage, to force Qualcomm to provide any of that and Qualcomm didn’t have any real initiative to do so. But times have changed and now Qualcomm has initiative to sell things like laptops with Snapdragons in it to consumers and wants for GNU/Linux distributions to run on such devices generically. First generation(s) of Snapdragon proved to be challenging, use of device trees for things like GPU and using a hybrid approach, on where lets say keyboard is handled by Windows ACPI. Note that Windows ACPI can’t be used for everything on GNU/Linux due to being too buggy and broken. Anyway, Qualcomm is committing to providing pure ACPI experience on Linux for future generations in consumer devices. So i guess it’s a process but hopefully Snapdragon X3 will already provide pure ACPI support on GNU/Linux. And it’s reasonable to expect Snapdragon X2 consumer devices to be better supported on GNU/Linux then Snapdragon X devices where in this past two years or so.
I heard there’s some new Intel CPUs whose energy efficiency comes close to ARM – like those in the Framework Pro laptop – so hopefully this is the way forward and we don’t need to think about ARM ever again.