Conversation
krzk

Krzysztof Kozlowski

Edited 2 days ago
If someone asked me 5 years ago, I would not believe that I could produce such a statement about major SoC vendor:
https://lore.kernel.org/all/2509536d-cdec-448d-bf20-80d2b3d6728a@kernel.org/

Qualcomm and Linaro were upstreaming before significant amount of code to the Linux kernel for supporting their SoCs , but around 2021-2022 things changed significantly. Just to recap major milestones of:

2022 November: One day after public announcement of new Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 flagship SoC (SM8550), Qualcomm Landing Team in Linaro posted basic support for it:
https://lore.kernel.org/all/20221116103146.2556846-1-abel.vesa@linaro.org/

2023 October: One day after public announcement of next flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 (SM8650), same team posts almost full (not basic!) support for it:
https://lore.kernel.org/all/20231025-topic-sm8650-upstream-dt-v1-0-a821712af62f@linaro.org/

2024 October: One day after public announcement of next flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite (SM8750), Linaro and Qualcomm team posts comprehensive support for it:
https://lore.kernel.org/all/20241021232114.2636083-1-quic_molvera@quicinc.com/

2025 September: Same day of public announcement of Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 (Kaanapali), Qualcomm posts comprehensive support for it:
https://lore.kernel.org/all/20250924-knp-dts-v1-0-3fdbc4b9e1b1@oss.qualcomm.com/

Now things changed:

2026 March and from now on: Qualcomm posts patches for unannounced SoC yet, getting way ahead, for example:
Hawi: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20260330-clk-hawi-v1-0-c2a663e1d35b@oss.qualcomm.com/
Maili: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20260522-maili-pinctrl-v1-0-0a6636f5c277@oss.qualcomm.com/
(I don't know which models are these, what I know is they are not yet announced)

And this list above does not include upstreaming of many other models from different segments.

People really missed how big transformation Qualcomm did in upstream Linux kernel involvement.
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hrw@society.oftrolls.com

Marcin Juszkiewicz 🙃

Reply to @krzk

@krzk

Thanks for the summary. It is really nice to see such change from one of big arm vendors.

Who knows, maybe arm space is not doomed yet.

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pinskia@hachyderm.io

Andrea (Drea) Tamar Pinski

Reply to @krzk

@krzk

If anyone is wondering why GCC and LLVM support for these are not upstream yet, we (qualcomm) have not focused on the micro-arch tuning instead we have been focused on improving the overall compilers.

Qualcomm also went from a non-contributor to GCC to being one of the top 5 companies contributing.

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krzk

Krzysztof Kozlowski

Reply to @krzk
I missed actually important milestone in July 2025 - first Linux kernel patches for Snapdragon X2 Elite SoC (next compute flagship model) were posted 2 months before public announcement:
https://lore.kernel.org/all/20250716151535.4054172-1-pankaj.patil@oss.qualcomm.com/
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fabrice@fosstodon.org

Fabrice Desré

Reply to @krzk

@krzk Honestly curious: how are reviewed and validated patches for SoC that are not publicly available yet?

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EonBlue@mastodon.social

EonBlue

Reply to @krzk

@krzk Not sure I understand this correctly, but does that get us any closer on supporting newer hardware on PostmarketOS? Or the issue there is different?

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krzk

Krzysztof Kozlowski

Reply to @fabrice@fosstodon.org
@fabrice Lack of public hardware access changes nothing in the review - you can still review everything the same way. And testing honestly also does not change much, since even after public announcement not many upstream developers have access to hardware to provide tests. IOW, testing would not differ if patch is released post announcement. Unless of course you mean years post, but that defeats any purpose of upstream (like is for 90% of other SoC vendors...).
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krzk

Krzysztof Kozlowski

Reply to @EonBlue@mastodon.social
@EonBlue This gets you closer to supporting every Linux distro on this newer hardware, so of course including PostmarketOS. I don't really care about Android, but it benefits from it as well.
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EonBlue@mastodon.social

EonBlue

Reply to @krzk

@krzk Thanks for clarifying, PostmarketOS is Alpine based, I have big hopes it will support newer devices at some point.

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bart@mastodon.fam-ribbers.com

PureTryOut

Reply to @krzk

@krzk That's great to hear! Now let's hope they start using/supporting ACPI and UEFI soon so we don't need device specific images anymore.

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wolf480pl@mstdn.io

Wolf480pl

Reply to @krzk

@krzk is Qualcomm hiring?

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