Qualcomm will finally support Linux on Snapdragon X2 chips
The Verge
Qualcomm will finally support Linux on Snapdragon X2 chips.
“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.
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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
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.
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.
Windows didn’t do well on these and they want to expand the market I guess
They got to get rid of those chips...
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.
Are they actually upstreaming anything or just “debian and ubuntu support™” where its just two random images they supply like sbc manufacturers usually do?
Fantastic.
3 years late, but I guess it wouldn’t be Qualcomm without a helping of disappointment.
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.
I was interested years ago potentially of a tablet form factor as a nice travel device
Don’t think I care anymore
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.