Linus Torvalds just tagged the Linux 6.11 kernel as stable. There are many changes and new features in Linux 6.11 including numerous AMD CPU and GPU improvements, preparations for upcoming Intel platforms, initial block atomic write support for NVMe and SCSI drives, the DRM Panic infrastructure can now display a monochrome logo if desired, easier support for building Pacman kernel packages for Arch Linux, DeviceTree files for initial Snapdragon X1 laptops, and much more.
↫ Michael Larabel
Especially the Snapdragon stuff interests me, as I really want to move to ARM for my laptop needs at some point, and I’m obviously not going to be using Windows or macOS. I hope the bringup for the Snapdragon laptop chips is smooth sailing from here and picks up pace, because I’d hate for Linux to miss out on this transition. Qualcomm talked big game about supporting Linux properly, but it feels like they’re – what a surprise – not backing those words up with actions so far.
As far as I see these ARM laptops have a trend to be locked up like phones. Wouldn’t be surprised Microsoft will try to make this happen.
Apple’s haven’t been locked up. They don’t go out of their way to provide docs for someone else to implement the necessary hardware drivers, but they don’t try to prevent it either.
I believe at one point MS required that secure boot couldn’t be disabled on any windows/arm devices however.
When it comes to ARM it needs to be said that GNU/Linux is ahead on this front. So saying things like hopefully i won’t need to use Microsoft Windows on an ARM laptop, to make it work, that doesn’t really make all that much sense, as Microsoft Windows support for ARM devices is worse. As for using macOS, those people don’t really care if it’s ARM based hardware, or not, for them it’s just a technical detail, so resulting to buy an Apple device, just to run ARM based hardware, that is an option, still this is not on how you are supposed to use Apple devices. You shouldn’t really care about things like if it’s ARM based or not. It’s whatever Apple decided it should be and you should be OK with that, or you are doing it wrong.
Indeed, the snapdragon based laptops are just an overgrown version of the chips that power almost every smartphone. Android powers most of them and itself still runs atop the £inux kernel. Support for snapdragon along with all the other Qualcom chips might hardly be considered newsworthy.
The myth is of a community of 133t hackers bringing £inux onto new platforms out of passion but in reality I suspect big money needs this to happen, hence my inclusion of the currency sign in £inux (just like Micro$oft).
@Thom, are you able to throw a bit more color on the statement “Qualcomm talked big game about supporting Linux properly, but it feels like they’re – what a surprise – not backing those words up with actions so far”?
They have been adding support since kernel 6.8 and new functionality was delivered as part of 6.11 as promised? Are there not a couple of X Elite laptops that are not more or less usable out of the box with Linux at this point? I mean, we probably need Fedora ARM to adopt the 6.11 kernel first ( I think that Ubuntu is going to in October ) but otherwise…
They are using UEFI boot as promised. Many of the drivers to support the SoC are merged into the mainline. The big hold-up seems to be device trees for real hardware. But that is coming along.
I have not seen a detailed list of what is in 6.11 yet. Is it far less than promised? Has progress really stalled? I would really love to know more as it seems like you have a very clear view on the matter.
Along with news that Fedora was going to make it easier to seemlessly run AMD64 apps on ARM64 ( these chips ), I was letting myself get a little excited. I can see myself picking one of these X Elite laptops up and I hardly ever spend my own money on “new” gear.
It sounds like I am getting ahead of myself. What am I missing?