A lot of people here seemed excited for these chips. It’ll be very interesting to see the gaming performance as this could bring in an entire new segment of portable devices running Linux if powerful enough to deliver solid battery life and CPU performance.
When did Qualcomm start giving a shit about Linux? They’ve been on my “hardware and chipsets to avoid if possible” list for pretty much ever.
Since they started targeting the PC segment with these chips to take on Apple’s insanely priced m-class chips, and Amazon and Google’s custom ARM datacenter chips.
They partnered with Canonical to do the first run of development for kernel support in the past year, and now it sounds like they’re moving to get the graphics driver developed and upstreamed.
Graphics driver for sc8280xp are already a thing. There are more issues in convenience daily driving linux, currently. From the top of my head:
I suspect that these issues are common between their ARM chips and will be addressed for both chips almost simultaneously. But I have no real idea on kernel development. And their documentation is only shared with linaro so one can only guess.
always? Android runs a linux kernel, and they support all kinds of embedded systems that run Linux.
Until recently, that “support” had been a barely supported forks of the linux kernel that were barely updated, and was so locked down that custom rom support was a pipedream on snapdragon processors. Which to be fair, is par for the course on most ARM chipsets (It’s the reason you see a lot of custom roms for android have extremely old and outdated kernels)
I’m glad to see more ARM companies moving towards working with upstream projects, and not just making working on their stuff a PITA to protect “Trade Secrets” or some bullshit like that.