Qualcomm goes where Apple won't, readies official Linux support for Snapdragon X Elite | Tom's Hardware
Qualcomm goes where Apple won't, readies official Linux support for Snapdragon X Elite | Tom's Hardware
Most of the functionality is present but many important bits are still being developed.
Most of the functionality is present but many important bits are still being developed.
One of the real downsides of ARM is, it seems, the relative lack of standardization. An x64 kernel? It'll run on most anything from the last ten years at least. And as for boot process, it's probably one of two options (and in many cases one computer can boot either legacy or EFI).
ARM, on the other hand...my raspberry pi collection does one thing, my Orange Pi does something else, and God help you if you want to try swapping the Orange kernel for the Raspberry (or vice versa)!
116Arm:
Somehow, the kernel has been loaded and we have transferred control into it.
59But we still need a hundred blobs and if the kernel needs to do something it has to make a call to the firmware.
This is what we get when you use Broadcom
23Somehow, the kernel returned. -Poe dameron
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A standard called SystemReady exists. For the systems that actually follow its standards, you can have a single ARM OS installation image that you copy to a USB drive and can then boot through UEFI and run with no problems on an Ampere server, an NXP device, an Nvidia Jetson system, and more.
Unfortunately it's a pretty new standard, only since 2020, and Qualcomm in particular is a major holdout who hasn't been using it.
Just like x86, you still need the OS to have drivers for the particular device you're installing on, but this standard at least lets you have a unified image, and many ARM vendors have been getting better about upstreaming open-source drivers in the Linux kernel.
53I'm hoping RISC-V will start showing up in consumer products soon. Hopefully the first ones will be Linux laptops. Windows doesn't have RISC-V support yet, does it? This might be the opportunity for Linux to become the default for RISC-V.
30I think a lot of the problem is how proprietary some of the hardware is. For instance, the Raspberry pi only runs the raspberry pi kernel which has a lot of proprietary blobs.
Meanwhile boards from Pine64 don't need proprietary software to boot. The achieve this by being selective with the hardware and hardware vendors.
14I don’t think this is as much of a problem, proprietary hardware is a thing on x86 too. The two big problems are a lack of boot standardization, and vendors not upstreaming their device drivers. A lack of standardization means it is difficult or impossible to use a single image to boot across different devices, and the lack of upstream drivers means even if you solved the boot process, you won’t be able to interface with peripherals without using a very custom kernel.
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“So far, Qualcomm has most of the critical functions working inside Linux, specifically version Linux 6.9 that was released not too long ago. These critical functions include UEFI-based boot support along with all the standard bootloaders like Grub and system-d.”
3Me, in tegra patchelf hell:
2It's not x86 vs ARM problem. But rather vendor problem, how AMD/Intel upstream their Linux support while other do not.
1The actual downside is, that you can't have generalized drivers.
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That is actually really good news
91Any hardware vendor taking Linux support seriously is good news!
45Which is most of them (Linux is great)
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Why is this surprising? Qualcomm releases Linux BSPs for all their mobile SoCs.
19the age of the linux phone is approaching. People keeping saying it isn't they're wrong, i don't know why they think otherwise.
9? the age of the Linux phone has been here for years with Android
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Apple has officially supported UNIX since 2001 on 3 different processor architectures. Not to mention countless high-profile open-source projects.
And, fwiw, the Ashai Linux project is doing a great job bringing Fedora to the Mac.
-8Ugh, that's because MacOS is built on top of Unix, but Apple doesn't provide official support for Linux or any drivers. Asahi Linux to my knowledge is a community led project which is trying to reverse engineer the hardware blobs to make it compatible with Linux.
Plus Apple with their consistent policy of gatekeeping is everything but open source champion.
20EDIT: I’m not here to defend Apples shitbag practices. How could anyone? But, like it or not, they DO contribute to FOSS a lot, and have a solid record of doing so for decades. So, hate them honestly, but they do deserve some very real credit in some important places.
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i deleted that comment 12 seconds after I posted it. How are you seeing it?
UGH
And it’s not “built on top of” anything (unless you consider OS X being built on top of NeXTSEP - although it was really a port/evolution, but they’re both BSD derivatives, like BSD was based on System V). It’s certified UNIX and has been since 2001. A BSD variant, specifically, using a Mach microkernel descendant called Darwin. And a BSD microkernel! in the 1980s! Still not seeing that in linux! It would be revolutionary!
but Apple doesn't provide official support for Linux or any drivers
So? Why should they? It’s a major competitor. Should they provide windows support too? Lol. (They don’t anymore, btw)
Plus Apple with their consistent policy of gatekeeping is everything but open source champion.
“Oh, boo hoo! They protect copyrights! Certainly they can’t also contribute to FOSS!”
WRONG!
Their current FOSS projects, including their brand new on-device ML/LLM (what the idiots call “AI”) models which aren’t even in iOS yet…
Their GitHub archive, including some older stuff:
A bunch of older repos:
And this is just a taste. Let’s not forget that they, basically, single-handedly ran OpenGL for 12 years and totally invented OpenCL and immediately open-sourced that. and a lot more (oh, you like multicore processors? Thank Apple for the fact you can effectively use them without paying intel or Microsoft for licensing rights!) For over three decades, Apple has been, very quietly, one of the biggest corporate contributors to the open-source communities in history.
Before you keep taking a shit on them, I suggest you do a little bit of educating yourself.
Edit 2: hate apple, fine. But they are HUGE FOSS contributors for over 30 years to landmark projects and have even been historic takers-over over some projects (like OpenGL) when they would, otherwise, have died. And, again OpenCL was 100% Apple. The multicore processing world would be nowhere today without that without it. Thanks Apple!
So hate Apple all you like for the shitty things they do, but give the, credit for the great things they have given us all - and how the Linux world - has benefitted for free.
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Ashai isn't Apple and has not been helped by Apple
13No shit, and I was pretty clear about how I described it in differentiating from what that project is doing from what Apple is doing. Try not to rage hate before you actually read what I said.
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