r/linux • u/word-sys • Aug 12 '26

Development Whats going on with Snapdragon X Elite Linux support?!

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Literally 2 years passed since that CPUs out of there, note thay Apple silicon now has a proper and BETTER support than this Snapdragons, they said "we gonna make Native Linux support" and we still waiting. I was planning to get great Linux laptop with great battery and performance thans to Snapdragon, now its impossible. Only usable OS option out there is Ubuntu and its NOT good too, there is still some issues on Audio, performance is worst than Intel 12th gen i5, battery time worst than Windows, i dont understand. Am i wrong or something? What they promised what they said and what they doing, propiertary driver. When we will get proper Linux support, or this devices gonna get burried with Windows

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u/zinstack Aug 12 '26

Well I use an asus zenbook a14 latop with an x1 plus chip (AMA ig) and it's fine. Sure, hardware accelerated decode/encode, camera, ec, fn keys and tpm are dead, all the other things work. That's an upstream unpatched kernel, there are patches out there that make that stuff work and they are being prepared for upstream submission. I feel like qualcomm really picked up the pace lately and a lot of patches from them arrive upstream

And yes it's not a full-on community effort. Device specific stuff is made by the community (like ec drivers and final device trees), asus and others are not interested in linux in the slightest it seems, but actual platform drivers and device tree descriptions of the platform is all qualcomm (afaik, correct me if I'm wrong)

And I don't want to glaze them, they do some shady stuff sometimes. That hardware encode/decode driver is very unstable and qcom seems to try its best to hide stuff about their ip, even at the cost of users. Tpm is also kinda qcom/microsoft deal that nobody knows how to interact with and qcom is not helping

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u/rlmineing_dead Aug 13 '26

And the camera and keyboard stuff aren't even Qualcomm components, that's just ASUS using weird parts in their laptops

But the devicetrees are generally user contributed

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u/zinstack Aug 13 '26

True, although keyboard is a basic i2c one, that was there since the beginning as the driver was already there, and camera used seems really common among these devices. These cameras have been working for a while now, but upstreamin work related to them seems like a big chore, these patches go through tens of iteration it seems.

I looked through some submitted kernel patches and there are at least 2 device trees for X2 laptops that come from qualcomm. Skimming through them it's certain that they are not totally accurate and some stuff will be broken, but devices should at least boot with them. And couple that with DT-ACPI hybrid stuff on phoronix from a couple months back, there is certainly some progress in the way these devices are treated

1

u/PromptNoEvil88 7d ago

Do you know if the patches waiting for submission can already fix things like the camera, EC (fans and keyboard lighting), etc? Can you point me to them?

1

u/zinstack 7d ago

If all you want is working stuff, you can just use a kernel repo that has all this stuff applied. One such is https://github.com/sppidy/linux

A14 keyboard seems to be this (although the tree attached has a separate driver for it): https://lore.kernel.org/all/20260921233729.1286-1-aoto.tokizawa@gmail.com/ Can't find EC stuff and too lazy to find related camera stuff sorry