> Needing the kernel to be changed for each device is an Androidism

It's an Armish not an Androidism. It's an embedded legacy that really doesn't make sense anymore. But inertia is powerful enough that even Apple is still using device trees, even on their M series SoCs ( https://asahilinux.org/docs/fw/adt/ )

There's no universally good solution for connecting varied kernels with varied hardware. Device tree is okay.

Kernels always have to be changed for different hardware, that's nothing new. x86 kernels don't run on ARM machines, full stop. Gameboy Advance kernels don't run on Switch 2. IBM mainframe kernels don't run on AWS EC2.

As part of good engineering practice we like to separate the parts that are volatile with regard to hardware changes from the parts that are nonvolatile. But that's a kernel implementation detail and we shouldn't pretend it means the combined kernel doesn't need to be changed.

We can also embed several volatile components for several different hardware configurations. That's called inefficiency, or bloat.

There were several attempts for hardware to incorporate the volatile component itself and be self-describing. ACPI (in ROM) is one; device-tree-in-ROM is another. Neither turned out to work well, because it turns out you actually want to evolve that code and so kernels contain lists of ROM patches anyway, which isn't much better than just including whatever was in the ROM to begin with.

Someone from Qualcomm posted a "DT-ACPI Hybrid Mode" set of patches a while back that let you call ACPI table functions, etc even while booting with the device tree, allowing you to control some things like keyboard lightning/power management independently. That would be a good first step but I'm not sure it went anywhere in the meantime. In theory supporting Device Tree by including the blob in a ROM somewhere shouldn't be much more work (if any) than including working ACPI tables, but we all know how that works out in practice!

Not at all, that is how all computers used to be before IBM PC clones happened, and is the world we are going back, as so many seem keen in killing x86 PC legacy, for their beloved ARM and RISC-V boards.

This is actually misinformed, the discussion on the mailing list made it clear: there is NO full ACPI on these Windows ARM devices; they only use ACPI marginally and still require and provide device tree.

Phoronix should have revised that article, it's completely misleading.

One option would be to implement the custom non-standard Qualcomm drivers that technically it needs to implement anyway, but with support for the UEFI/ACPI interface.

On Windows, Qualcomm ships custom drivers that override normal ACPI platform logic in various places, IIRC

There is also ARM SystemReady which is an existing spec for this mainly intended for servers. But it’s not being followed well.

It’s crazy to need a million device trees on server or laptop class devices.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45086346

I've been working on embedded systems using iMX8s, and it's equally awful. You have to maintain your own fork of UBoot. You have to spend hours tweaking device trees. The "NXP" kernel is out of date and never updated, the mainline kernel is missing loads of drivers.

Meanwhile in x86 land you can just download a distro and boot it. Secure boot works out of the box. It's night and day.

This is tragic to read. An ARM-based Thinkpad ultrabook running Fedora on it would be a "forever" device for me. I adore my X1 Carbon Gen7 but the battery life could definitely be better and I could stand for it to run a little cooler.

I also have an X13s and it's also the best laptop I've owned... Sort of.

I ran Windows on it up until a few months ago and it was as you said, delightful. Long battery life, fanless, great size, great screen. I put Ubuntu on it (where they've mainlined a good bit of things), and it's still just not very good. Sleep doesn't work (and never will without Qualcomm), certain things still just crash on occasion -- but I do think the webcam works.

I'll likely put Windows back on at some point, which is a shame, because the laptop is great, but Windows is terrible. I simply do not believe any claims Qualcomm has about future support, as much as I'd love to see a newer Thinkpad device with full ARM support.

Whew, thank you for this summary. I just got this laptop as it seemed to have "good" Linux potential, but I've been stuck so far. And as further caution to others, hibernate doesn't work on Linux, and audio is glitchy. Even on windows 11 pro the shutdown menu is missing. It seems to sleep on windows but not sure about battery drain, which is reported to be 1-2%/hr in Linux.

This makes me pretty sad. But I'm still hoping i can have a linux arm laptop in my lifetime; maybe in 10-20 years.

> I don't think that ARM Laptops have a chance in Linux land as long as each model requires stuff like a custom DT.

Why? In theory the UEFI firmware can pass Linux a devicetree. Not much different to different laptops having different ACPI tables.

This sounds like a terrible situation, but I wonder if a weekend of Claude iterating could improve on any of these problems. They seem to have been pretty successful on the Mac M series.

I've been waiting for someone to write a DTS for a Snapdragon(R) X - X126100 - Qualcomm(R) Oryon(TM) CPU based laptop I bought over a year ago. Some people are trying but it can't be that easy ... Starting to look into doing it myself and AFAICT it requires reading the ACPI tables (written for Windows drivers), and manually converting it to devicetree, test, tweak, repeat.

This. The X1 Elite laptops came out 2+ years ago, but you still need to use a special Ubuntu remix to get everything* working, and support is very dependent on which laptop you bought. You could say it’s not Qualcomm’s job to make audio or the camera work on every Lenovo/Dell/HP, but someone needs to do it…

*: I’m sure there’s some features that still aren’t working right.

If Apple was lazy, they wouldn’t have spent five years getting rid of Qualcomm modems, Qualcomm is also getting squeezed by the Chinese, Mediatek, Microsoft, Nvidia, Samsung and Apple worldwide.

It will be interesting. because Qualcomm doesn’t give away anything for free, so any of those Linux Distro’s who thinks it’s going to be a free lunch? Are gonna be in for a surprise.

> Apple gets lazy on top.

A20 Pro P-Core is the largest jump in performance per watt in the past 5 years. I am not sure why Apple is lazy in their hardware front. Not the same could be said about their software though.

Those that dream of an ARM ecosystem don't realise what they are getting.

Finally the end of IBM PC clones is taking shape.

I'm more on the Apple hater side, but they getting lazy is simply not true.

For many years Apple dominates the Laptop hardware scene, and while there is no comparably performing competitors threatening them, they keep releasing newer, faster, more efficient chips. After using many operating systems, I know that for sure I don't want MacOS, but the hardware itself is hard to beat.

Me too. Not a fan of Qualcomm, though.

>And since PC makers are far more willing to experiment with form factors

What are you thinking of here? ATX is from 1995 and ITX from 2001, since then we've had stuff like the lamp imac, trashcan mac pro and nowadays the finger-thin imac and tiny mac mini from Apple.

Intel panther lake is already very close. Good enough for me to be happy with it.

Is the M series that much better than a modern ADM/Intel? Or is it that they barely need cooling? I have an AMD laptop and Mac Mini, the Mac never makes any noise. Or is the M series just faster?

The Thinkpad T14s 2-in-1 with Intel Core Ultra 5 has great battery life: 10+ hours with moderate usage. I also have the Snapdragon T14s which gets about 14 hours, but I'm still waiting to get full Linux support for this two year old laptop.

Note however, since I've been using my Thinkpad 2-in-1 on battery almost everyday for a year, it is somewhat degraded. upower shows

    energy-full:         50.61 Wh
    energy-full-design:  58 Wh

T14 gen7?

They'd still have the >99% or so of their customers who prefer Windows or will put up with it for the smartphone-grade battery life.

Check this chart. Single core performance is where Apple has dominated the most. Qualcomm is above every non-Apple competitor including desktop chips, and only 5% behind the fastest M5 MacBook Air (this chip is going into Air-class laptops). Yes, M6 is coming, but X2 has been available for months already.

https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks

that's x2 plus. look for benchmarks of the x2 elite extreme, which currently is selling with 48gb ram for $1370: https://www.bestbuy.com/product/asus-zenbook-a16-16-3k-oled-...

I also had the X1 Snapdragon T14s and it felt like going back to 2008 linux.

No wifi, no bluetooth, no fingerprint reader, no hardware accelerated 3D..

There is a special version of Ubuntu that largely works (it's a bit old) and if you dist-upgrade to a new version it will break.

I spent about a week trying to get it working and just gave up, awful experience.

Historically speaking, between average Android device and average Chromebook, latter is far easier to get mainline kernel + "normal" Linux distro running, e.g: 8 Chromebooks vs. only 1 Android device (and even that is a dev. board) in official Arch supported hardware list:

https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms

Alas, new Chromebooks are no more. "Successor" Googlebooks are all Android.

As is WebOS, Raspberry PI, Beagle Boards, netbooks, PS2Linux, PS3 OtherOS,....

Regular OEMs will never give their differentiation factor freely.

Even Linux OEMs like Tuxedo apparently cannot get access to hardware specifications, and have to reverse engineer their own devices.

Makes me wonder how long until Framework starts shipping ARM-based motherboards. They already sell a RISC-V-based motherboard for the 13.

This!

I've had a Snapdragon X Elite laptop for 2 years, constantly trying to get Linux off the ground on it. Didn't happen (well, technically, toward the end of that period, there was an unsupported port of Ubuntu but it lacked half the drivers). And yes, when I bought it there was a very similar announcement from Qualcomm promising first-class Linux support. So I wouldn't gamble on it (especially considering that prices are crazy) until there indeed is a supported distro.

It potentially can be a good thing, but anyone who is jumping up and down celebrating better wait and see, Qualcomm is more of a lawyer/finance company than a tech company in short a patent troll at heart, so it will be interesting to see what type of fee they want to have the privilege of being on their hardware. In the telecom area historically, they like double dipping.

But they support Android right? Won't that mean kernel support is public already? It would have to be merged into mainline. Or is this about something else?

I mean it technically can run linux. But I think non one actually got any desktop or graphics working. I hope it just happens but you are sadly correct here.

Actually, my bad, it is available in the US, but seemingly not Europe.

Was that Framework 13 Pro? I thought these were supposed to have Panther and be much more efficient and quiet?

That's the dream. But I am quite sure Framework is looking into it, if not only because Windows on ARM is gaining traction, which means developers need an ARM machine to develop. I can imagine some would want two identical machines, one with X86_64, one with aarch64.

> Qualcomm has been upstreaming Linux kernel support for the Snapdragon X for the past 2 years or so, but the community is still having issues with drivers and firmware on devices.

Is QCM slow to upstream or are they doing things in an incomplete manner or is there some other reason?

I'm trying to imagine a world where intel or amd releases a new platform/chip and it takes _two years_ to get linux booting on it

> but seems not much came from the effort

That's been my experience dealing with QCM based devices running linux in the past. Some OEM buys a batch of chips, gets a reference design and an old version of the linux kernel with a zillion out-of-tree hacks and patches that make updates impossible.

I generally advise clients to use rockchip as they have _very_ good mainline support and put any QCM modem at the end of a USB connection so it doesn't hold the product back.

I wonder how long someone can spend a pile of tokens and start shredding these firmwares down to their actual instructions/code.

I don't think so. Every device has locked down firmware really these days, it's not an issue (most peoples BIOS/UEFI/etc is very much not open source).

If the drivers are upstreamed and good, it should work well.

Android phones don't need (and often don't have) upstreamed "drivers". They use qualcomm's closed-source code. Also, Android user land driver (HAL) isn't useful for non-Android Linux distros.

Yes, with proprietary blobs. Oh, and also running a version of the Linux kernel that’s been out of support for years (on some devices, not all).

This is the danger when you don’t upstream your shit. Now you’re stuck on kernel 3 or 4 because your chip vendor is lazy. And Qualcomm has got to be one of the laziest.

Google controls the Android ecosystem (restricts what OEMs can do) and employs various practices to ensure there's no alternative besides Apple (this duopoly suits both of them). Chipmakers essentially focus on ensuring they can sell access to BSPs which meet Google requirements, as there's no real alternative for smartphones. If you're not Apple, these chips are meant to be used with GMS Android, that's the expectation.

If there were alternatives (like on the desktop and for some parts of IoT) it would be more cost-efficient to upstream everything, but with the current situation it's fully up to Google.

When Google wanted them to move all their chip-specific code to modules (GKI), they had to do that. And if someone at Google randomly decided "hey, now you'll upstream this stuff", then guess what? They'd have to follow, it's how this monopoly works.

The words "full backwards compatible" are not entirely true in my experience.

Sure, but all the software I want to run uses X instead of Wayland. And it would be cool if we could get reliable key remapping under systemd and wayland.

Qualcomm expects to be paid. a toll/fee by each one of the Linux Distro’s for the privilege of being on the hardware with their chips in the device that is their history and one of the reasons why Apple spent five years kicking them out, they very definitely don’t act as a charity, so in the end, it will be interesting because someone is gonna pay their fee. the end user maybe?

I don't think that would help with GPU or NPU, which another comment states are the drivers that Qualcomm are upstreaming.

AFAIk this has nothing to do with Qualcomm but with vendors and Microsoft.

>I'll never understand why SoC manufactures insist on bespoke kernel/distro pairings

So that if you want to use the next distro release you will be forced to buy their next-gen chip because that's the only supported one on that distro. D'uh.

> I'll never understand why SoC manufactures insist on bespoke kernel/distro pairings.

Because getting your stuff upstreamed in Linux is more work than releasing a custom kernel.

Apple’s advantage is being the last vertical computer company from the 1980s speaks for itself. having control of the hardware and the operating system software with the ability to create new ecosystems is their advantage in comparison to hardware or software only companies, Note: the tech world would be a better place if Sun, SGI, Digital, Acorn, Motorola of Schaumburg, Illinois had been able to survive the Microsoft/Intel onslaught.

Is it more work to support a completely proprietary boot path or three different "standard" boot paths?

Advantage of commitment and integration. Apple doesn't need to worry about critical vendors not cooperating because sticking with x86 is less risky.

Ironically that's being fixed by Microsoft forcing UEFI.

Their Elite is not the 'Extreme', just a regular one, X2E-88-100, with a significant performance difference.

Fascinating. I did actually do a quick search and all the results were for google books, not a computer os.

It's called USB4 now.