A lot of people here seemed excited for these chips. It’ll be very interesting to see the gaming performance as this could bring in an entire new segment of portable devices running Linux if powerful enough to deliver solid battery life and CPU performance.

  • octopus_ink@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    25
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    4 months ago

    When did Qualcomm start giving a shit about Linux? They’ve been on my “hardware and chipsets to avoid if possible” list for pretty much ever.

    • just_another_person@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      24
      ·
      4 months ago

      Since they started targeting the PC segment with these chips to take on Apple’s insanely priced m-class chips, and Amazon and Google’s custom ARM datacenter chips.

      They partnered with Canonical to do the first run of development for kernel support in the past year, and now it sounds like they’re moving to get the graphics driver developed and upstreamed.

      • mryessir@lemmy.sdf.org
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        4 months ago

        Graphics driver for sc8280xp are already a thing. There are more issues in convenience daily driving linux, currently. From the top of my head:

        • firmware update path
        • dtb update/loading path
        • no virtualization
        • no universal dock compability
        • missing HDMI/DP features

        I suspect that these issues are common between their ARM chips and will be addressed for both chips almost simultaneously. But I have no real idea on kernel development. And their documentation is only shared with linaro so one can only guess.

    • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      4 months ago

      You are very wrong here. They open-source a lot of things and they even used to have their own open-source modified version of Android for their phone chips.

      • octopus_ink@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        4 months ago

        OK, correction accepted. I probably did conflate them with Broadcom. Someone should let those ubuntu folks know though… ;)

        • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          7
          ·
          4 months ago

          Oh it’s ok. Broadcom is a very bad company in terms of open-source and Linux support. Their most known products are WiFi modules for laptops. Qualcomm on the other hand is probably one of the most open-source friendly commercial companies and it’s known for very popular mobile processors such as the Snapdragon series.

          • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            5
            ·
            4 months ago

            I wouldn’t call Qualcomm great for foss. It just better than absolutely terrible. Also Broadcom is a terrible company all around. They buy others and then wring them dry.

            • LeFantome@programming.dev
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              edit-2
              4 months ago

              If the X Elite mainline kernel support pans out, Qualcomm may become top tier in terms of support. It would certainly make them the most important Linux ARM chip. We will see.

            • Norah - She/They@lemmy.blahaj.zone
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              4 months ago

              You mean like what they’re doing to VMware and canning perpetual licenses the second they took over? I guess in some ways they are actually great for FOSS, because I’ve never seen more interest by Enterprise in Proxmox before they made that decision.

    • chrash0@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      arrow-down
      5
      ·
      4 months ago

      always? Android runs a linux kernel, and they support all kinds of embedded systems that run Linux.

      • Charadon@lemmy.sdf.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        14
        ·
        4 months ago

        Until recently, that “support” had been a barely supported forks of the linux kernel that were barely updated, and was so locked down that custom rom support was a pipedream on snapdragon processors. Which to be fair, is par for the course on most ARM chipsets (It’s the reason you see a lot of custom roms for android have extremely old and outdated kernels)

        I’m glad to see more ARM companies moving towards working with upstream projects, and not just making working on their stuff a PITA to protect “Trade Secrets” or some bullshit like that.

      • octopus_ink@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        edit-2
        4 months ago

        I’m sorry for leaving out the word “desktop”. I’m well aware that Android runs the Linux kernel and that many embedded systems run Linux.

        Possibly I conflated them with Broadcom, but I feel sure I recall Qualcomm’s lack of openness being problematic in the past also.

        Edit - yeah, folks jumping through hoops for their wifi at least as recently as Ubuntu 20.04. https://askubuntu.com/questions/1277359/my-qualcomm-atheros-qca9377-wireless-adopter-is-not-working-in-ubuntu-20-04-lts

        • chrash0@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          4
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          4 months ago

          ah yeah. maybe less well known, but i had a dev kit from Qualcomm that came with Ubuntu

    • uis@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      4 months ago

      They are shit, but not as shit as Broadcom. The problem with Qcm is their monopolistic behavior and closing details on RF part of chips.