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embedding-shapetoday at 4:33 PM3 repliesview on HN

Seems like not? Judging based on https://github.com/qualcomm-linux something is happening, although I can't say how much. They definitively seem awake at least.


Replies

jeroenhdtoday at 4:47 PM

The problem with these chips on Linux is that something has been happening for months but you still end up needing to download special editions of ARM Linux images to get these devices to work properly.

Some distros still need extracting Qualcomm firmware from Windows to get Linux to work properly. Audio remains a challenge, like x86 Linux decades ago. Apparently camera stuff works these days but produces images of subpar quality.

These issues also occur on normal Linux. My experience with my Lenovo+Intel laptop was that it took three months after release for the firmware to work properly (and the Nvidia drivers took much longer, but that's my fault for buying something containing Nvidia hardware). Intel managed to do what Qualcomm did in months rather than years.

I hope Qualcomm finally sorts this shit out, I really do, but with the prices of computers these days, I'm going to need to see quite the discount before I'll consider buying anything with a Snapdragon.

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justincormacktoday at 4:49 PM

They run a hypervisor under the OS, and dont support actually running directly on the hardware, its very odd.

Elixir6419today at 5:33 PM

one of the biggest issue i see is the devicetree nonsense. It makes every single laptop and bios version very unique and requires a lot of housekeeping. There are also big chunks of work (as i understand it) to be done around hibernate and decent suspend support.

My experience (wanted to use x13s as daily sriver) is that there was good progress for about a year, until jhovold was leading the charge, but something expired and qualcom as far as i can tell forgot that some progress should happen on x1 and x8c as well as x2.

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