Qualcomm Linux 2.0

https://www.qualcomm.com/developer/blog/2026/06/qualcomm-linux-2-now-available

by gilgamesh3 • 21 days ago

134 69 21 days ago

qualcomm.com

LorenDB• 21 days ago

And here I was hoping they'd decided to support Linux on the Snapdragon X2 chips.

wmf4• 21 days ago

It's happening: https://www.phoronix.com/news/HP-EliteBook-X-G2q-Linux

senectus1• 21 days ago

holy hell.. the price tags...!

diabllicseagull• 21 days ago

From the June 4th article: "These patches are a result of a collaboration between a couple of Qualcomm engineers taking part in an internal sprint and were created over 3 days."

it's not giving me any warm and fuzzy.

abc422• 21 days ago

I used to believe, but now it seems to me that AMD and Intel will match Snapdragon's efficiency on x86 before that stuff is stable.

_fzslm• 21 days ago

I have a gorgeous Surface Pro 11 X1 Elite that can run just enough Linux to tease me with how beautiful it could be, but it's still unstable enough that I can't daily it.

Torture.

pylotlight• 21 days ago

It's really that weak?

keyle2• 21 days ago

I recently tried to get BSD/Linux to work on my omnibook X 14 and... it's been a journey!

Eventually I got it to work well with [1] and extracted firmware off github because I had wiped Windows and all partitions into oblivion.

I was looking for the bliss of fan-less linux with ARM. The joy! [2]

[1] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-concept-snapdragon-x-e...

[2] the fans are ON permanently

mrheosuper• 21 days ago

If you want fanless arm linux machine, why not macbook m2 air + asahi linux ?

disdi89• 21 days ago

It is sad to see that they still do not support Snapdragon products with Linux offically as a product

pjmlp2• 21 days ago

When will folks learn companies only support Linux or any other FOSS to the extent their own business goals?

None of them are on the game for the well being of the community or whatever.

Profits and lower R&D costs, that is all.

guilamu• 21 days ago

Wouldn't you say that Valve is an exception to that rule?

kelvinjps10• 20 days ago

But it benefits the community

bfrog2• 20 days ago

Nah they'd rather try to continue to force snapdragon on windows where no one actually cares about this and the experience is trash.

AArch64 is dead for Windows and client Linux, and the knife is in Qualcomm's hands.

officeplant2• 20 days ago

Never trust Qualcomm in the linux space. It only leads to frustration. Somehow I've had to learn this lesson more than once because I'm not the smartest ARM addict.

coredog64• 21 days ago

Recently bought an SBC with a QCS6490 (https://radxa.com/products/dragon/q6a/). Curious to see if the vendor winds up using this as a base.

mrbluecoat• 21 days ago

We'll see. They purposely dropped all server/console support and now only offer a Debian desktop image, which seems crazy for an SBC. Not exactly a welcome mat:

Other variants that were previously provided AS-IS are no longer provided. Interested users need to build those by themselves.

https://github.com/radxa-build/radxa-dragon-q6a

AI / NPU use cases have been severely hampered as well:

https://gist.github.com/Foadsf/3cc2e0ed357c3ac7180589701bf83...

I've personally been wrestling with their broken I2C for a couple weeks.

Really want to love this board but lots of sharp edges at the moment. Hopefully Qualcomm keeps dedicating resources to improving things - I know it's hard work!

Skinney• 21 days ago

MNT just started offering the QCS6490 for their laptops.

https://mnt.re/media/reform_md/2026-06-30-june-update.html

nullpoint4203• 21 days ago

Just upstream your drivers! Then you don't need Qualcomm Linux.... you just have Linux.

sipjca• 21 days ago

for real

eschaton• 21 days ago

Why can’t upstream just take their drivers? Isn’t that the point of requiring those drivers to be GPL?

zamadatix• 21 days ago

Imagine you wrote a WYSIWYG text editor, like Libre Office Writer. You have all sorts of functionality and an overall architecture which makes it sane to upkeep the project & have things work well together. Then someone else makes a custom font, but kind of does it their own way and with a different approach making it a one off from the way the rest of the fonts all work and are used in the program maybe using a custom font file format parser and different UI element even though you know it could have just used the normal, already maintained and planned out code paths.

You can of course merge anything with the right license if you so like, like that one off font code into your editor, but if it doesn't fit well into the overall project or meet the general quality standards of it then it's not practical to and can actually be worse than not including it. Upstreaming is about submitting something the maintainer can reasonably accept and maintain, not just about whether working code is available. GPL licensed code provides the latter, it's still up to someone (either the original company or some other interested person) to make it fit right first.

wmf4• 21 days ago

Upstream requires a level of quality most developers cannot meet.

noselasd• 21 days ago

Ofcourse they can. But which particular person will do it ?

The "upstream" people deal with their own drivers, subsystems or tasks which takes up their time - but if someone feels they want to take on this too, they'll do it (normally that doesn't happen - it's up to the original authors to take responsibility)

mjg593• 21 days ago

Linux tries to avoid special cases. That means that when someone shows up with a new driver that's either not something that fits into an existing category, or which sort of (but doesn't entirely) overlap with an existing driver, there's an extended set of design discussions about how to make this new driver fit into existing infrastructure in a way that's consistent with what's there and which also allows new things to exist.

That sounds great from a design perspective, but it can also lead to cases where people are attempting to design for utter unknowns - potential futures that may or may not exist, theoretical understandings of how hardware works, that kind of thing. It frequently prevents new drivers being merged without significant modification, and sometimes it results in a need to entirely rearchitect the relevant part of the kernel before the driver can even be considered (and also now you need to split that driver into three parts). Upstreaming is hard.

realusername• 21 days ago

The quality of the qcom code is way too low for upstream

trentor• 21 days ago

Qualcomm is not a good software steward. Every time I used something they had their hand in, it was abandoned rather sooner than later.

Eudora: bought, milked, killed. BREW: rotted. AllJoyn: dead. Toq/Mirasol: gone in two years. CodeAurora: shut down. And the $899 Snapdragon Dev Kit: shipped months late, then cancelled with support "paused indefinitely" while units were still in transit. Even Adreno drivers barely get updates after launch.

The silicon is great. But software at Qualcomm is a launch checkbox, not a commitment. At this point, "powered by Qualcomm" on a dev platform is a signal to stay away.

leejoramo• 20 days ago

It has now been decades since I used Eudora. I still feel I lost the best email client due to Qualcomm’s neglect

bigfishrunning2• 20 days ago

Eudora was the first email client I used in the 90s, I didn't know that qualcomm was responsible for it's disappearance. Looks like the source was released in its last breath[0]; i'm a bit surprised it hasn't been scooped up and maintained anywhere

[0] https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-eudora-email-client-sou...

olaf• 21 days ago

Recently, Qualcomm acquired Modular/Mojolang/Chris Lattner et. al..

aa-jv• 21 days ago

Qualcomm are forever blacklisted in my environment, because of their fuckery with backdoors for the spook agencies which fund their research.

I will definitely not be touching their Linux variant for that reason. I simply don't trust the company, one bit. They are the American Huawei.

bfrog2• 20 days ago

Ah yes, the qualcomm way. Rather than upstreaming things so it just works make a Qualcomm Linux, perhaps with NDA and laywer speak to sign off on to get access to anything at all, all to use their mediocre hardware.

Qualcomm you suck, upstream your drivers, make it open. Stop faffing about with closed proprietary junk. Somehow Intel, Tenstorrent, and AMD understand this but you don't. You aren't NVIDIA! Even if you were NVIDIA know that people absolutely despise that model.

panny• 20 days ago

I was just about to complain about being locked into one kernel version, being at the mercy of a single vendor, but you said it so much better than I would have :) Thanks.

readme• 20 days ago

Yocto sounds like it makes me feel when I use it

bigfishrunning2• 20 days ago

Sure, it's not great, it's just better (for some tasks) then every tool it's competing with. Buildroot is simpler, but not as flexible, etc...

Qualcomm Linux 2.0

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