The initial support was posted on October 25th 2023 on the Linux kernel mailing lists for review by the Linux developers community. With the set of patches released by Linaro engineers, it is also possible to boot an AOSP image with Graphics Software Rendering using Google’s SwiftShader.
Since 2014, Linaro Engineers have been working closely with Qualcomm Engineers to enable Snapdragon platforms to work with Mainline Linux.
Running a recent upstream Linux kernel immediately after the announcement of a new SoC is a significant achievement, and is a testimony to the close working partnership between Qualcomm and Linaro.
Interestingly enough, during the recent announcement of the PC-focused X Elite SoC, Qualcomm also highlighted that Linux will be fully supported by the platform, and to underline that point, the company showed off X Elite laptops running both Windows and Linux. While it’ll take more to convince me that Qualcomm now actually cares about properly supporting its SoCs and the open source community, they’re at least positive signs.
Let’s hope they do a much better job than Apple has with their ARM Macs. If they could provide options with 32GBs of RAM and greater, I’m in.