Brussels / 3 & 4 February 2024

schedule

Mainline Linux on Qualcomm SoCs, are we here now ?


Yes, and we’re in pretty good shape!

For the last 10 years, Qualcomm’s engineers and Linaro’s Qualcomm Landing Team has been working hard to carefully implement Linux mainline support for Qualcomm platforms, and so far so good it’s pretty good now as you can judge with the very good Thinkpad X13S support.

Neil will do a tour of all supported platforms, describe the work the Linaro’s Qualcomm Landing Team has achieved so far and the key features engineers are working on. The Qualcomm SoCs are notoriously very complex and very powerful, and implementing clean, correct, maintainable and extensible support for mainline Linux is particularly hard. Key domains like Power or DSP management were particularly hard to support, with those in good shape multimedia, connectivity and network features getting enabled permitting Qualcomm based devices to offer excellent support while running vanilla (unmodified) Linux kernel !

The Thinkpad X13S is a great example of such support, because until recently it was limited to expensive and hard to buy Qualcomm Reference platforms.

Nevertheless the Qualcomm Reference platforms also get as early as possible mainline support, without any concessions on code quality, like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 mailing-list patches delivered on marketing announcement day.

The talk will propose a tour of supported platforms, current and possible future achievements, and integration examples with mobile distributions like PostmarketOS.

Speakers

Photo of Neil Armstrong Neil Armstrong

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