Qualcomm will finally support Linux on Snapdragon X2 chips

21 days ago by LCP to c/technology

“For many years developers have asked us for one thing, Linux on Snapdragon. We heard you,” says Kedar Kondap, SVP and general manager of compute and gaming at Qualcomm. Speaking at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit, Kondap says Linux support with Debian will be available “at the end of this year” for Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon X2 series of chips. Qualcomm is upstreaming core drivers, including for its Hexagon NPU and Adreno GPU. Ubuntu support is also coming in the first half of 2027. [Image: https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/09/chrome_KLSva2KkHU.png?quality=90&strip=all]
AI_toothbrush 51 points 21 days ago

Are they actually upstreaming anything or just "debian and ubuntu support™" where its just two random images they supply like sbc manufacturers usually do?

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stochastic_parrot 16 points 20 days ago

In their blog post, they elaborate:

The first priority is upstreaming the drivers that unlock real workloads, including Qualcomm Hexagon NPU support through fastRPC for on-device AI inference and GPU support through Freedreno , Turnip and Rusticl the open-source Mesa drivers for Qualcomm Adreno graphics and compute. ... Out-of-tree patches may help early bring-up, but mainline support is what distribution maintainers and long-term developers can build on across kernel releases.

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anzo 48 points 21 days ago

As much as I welcome this I can't help but wonder, why do they care?

Is it because it was the year of the Linux desktop? ;D

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TobuscusLover2001 41 points 21 days ago

Same reason NVIDIA finally started prioritising open source drivers for linux all of a sudden... Its AI :/. The laptops are even called copilot+ PCs. They wanna make AI dev for those data centers that keep popping up as easy as possible. Thats literally the only reason.

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undu 27 points 21 days ago

If I had to guess, it would be to have an easier time getting intoe the server market.

Being able to develop on the same platform as the one that a program is deployed to usually allows for much lower friction and faster development cycles.

It can also be used to ramp up collaboration with the Linux project, which is useful for getting patches upstreames promptly.

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dudeface 10 points 21 days ago

Windows didn’t do well on these and they want to expand the market I guess

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SharkAttak 3 points 21 days ago

They got to get rid of those chips...

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TheWilliamist 1 point 19 days ago

They may not have done well fiscally however I’ve been using a Lenovo ARM64 desktop and laptop for quite a while and my only pain points are the horrible, awful, type 4 printer support and having to hack around to get the shittastic VMware remote console (VMRC) to install.

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RelativeArea1 5 points 21 days ago

AI, same thing why nvidia kinda went a bit loosy with their drivers on linux, windows is too limiting and freeBSD is apple's main bitch.

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protogen420 6 points 20 days ago

apple has nevee meaningfully contributed to BSDs, they are just a disgusting leech, the reason why FreeBSD isnt as big is simply because Linux won the Unix wars that strongly

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RelativeArea1 2 points 20 days ago

they are just a disgusting leech

yea thats what i want to say as well

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chronicledmonocle 2 points 21 days ago

How do you figure FreeBSD is influenced by Apple? macOS and iOS don't use FreeBSD. They use Darwin, which is a BSD fork, but not related to FreeBSD at all AFAIK besides they have some of the userland tools.

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RelativeArea1 1 point 20 days ago

influenced? in coding mostly not, but darwin is based on older bsds including freebsd that has been impacful for macOS (and meta btw, freebsd not darwin) since it has the major development throughout compared to others eg. openstep (and they dont like copyleft licenses embedded on linux).

Apple has also been found rebasing openbsd codes as thiers.

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chronicledmonocle 5 points 19 days ago

As someone who works for a company that develops FreeBSD kernel code, your doing an awful lot of conflating between BSDs. You're basically saying that ChromeOS and Fedora are the same because they use the Linux kernel.

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dust_accelerator 23 points 21 days ago

Fantastic.

3 years late, but I guess it wouldn't be Qualcomm without a helping of disappointment.

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utopiah 18 points 21 days ago

Late indeed but with the Frame already shipped running Arch and KDE on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 it's definitely going to be interesting.

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Quazatron 15 points 21 days ago

Qualcomm wants a piece of Nvidia's server market pie.

I expect the "support" is to ship some binary blobs in a open source wrapper at most, like Nvidia does.

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dudeface 10 points 21 days ago

I was interested years ago potentially of a tablet form factor as a nice travel device

Don’t think I care anymore

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pineapplelover -2 points 19 days ago

I thought it was in issue with Linux not supporting Qualcomm chips, not the other way around

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megopie 11 points 19 days ago

Linux didn’t support the chips because Qualcomm hadn’t released what was needed to do so. They didn’t make the necessary drivers, nor released what was needed for someone in the community to make it for them. Same issue Nvidia cards have had with Linux.

It’s not anything about Linux that makes it incompatible, but the companies are unwilling by to provide support and unwilling to let anyone else do it for them due to being protective of their proprietary firmware.

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pineapplelover 1 point 18 days ago

Ah thanks for clearing things up. I never looked in to it too deep and am really really excited about this

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