When Qualcomm launched the powerful 4.2 GHz Snapdragon X Elite 12-core Arm SoC for “mobile PCs” (better known as laptops), I was surprised they showed benchmarks for both Windows and Linux as in the past, the company focused on Windows only for this type of processor.
But at the time we were only shown Geekbench 6.2 results in Linux, so it was not clear what was supported at the time. But a recent post by Abel Vesa, Linaro engineer, explains a fully working Debian 12 image with GPU rendering and WiFi connectivity was ready right before launch and work is now being done to upstream the code to Linux mainline.
In this post, he shares the Linux upstreaming plan and provides instructions to install Debian 12 on an official Snapdragon X Elite reference design.
Upstreaming will be done in two parts, starting with support for the following:
- Qualcomm Oryon CPUs
- Clocks, interconnects, regulators, power domains, and pinctrl providers
- Low-Speed I/O: I2C, SPI, UART
- Compute Reference Device (CRD) and Qualcomm Compute Platform (QCP) boards support
We’re told that at the time of writing (January 4, 2024), the interconnects, pinctrl, and power domains had already been merged, but I can’t find anything related to Snapdragon X Elite (X1E80100) or Oryon in the changelog for Linux 6.7. I’m probably not looking at the right places…
The second series of patchsets will add support for the following:
- CPUFreq support
- High-Speed peripherals: PCIe Gen3 and Gen4, USB SuperSpeed
- Embedded DisplayPort support
- GPU support
- Qualcomm Hexagon Processor SubSystem (Audio)
- Additional features for the Compute Reference Design (CRD): trackpad, touchscreen, keyboard, battery management, NVMe, and WLAN
Those should be merged in Linux 6.8 if everything goes according to plans. Audio and camera support will also be worked on later on. You can check out the current Linux kernel code for the Snapdragon X Elite on Linaro git.
It’s already possible to install Debian 12 with GPU and WiFi support on the Qualcomm CRB (in the unlikely case you own one) with instructions for dual-booting with Windows a bit more complicated than on Intel/AMD platforms where users just need to download the ISO and create a boot disk… With the Snapdragon X Elite CRB, you’ll still need to download the Debian install and create a boot disk with Rufus, but you need to enter some key combinations to enter the EDL shell, switch to USB boot, use a USB to Ethernet adapter for network connectivity, modify EFI boot option, and run of a bunch of other commands…
Considering commercial devices based on the Snapdragon X Elite processor are planned for mid-2024, it’s not impossible for Linux distribution such as Debian to work out of the box once X Elite laptops and computers start selling.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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