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I don’t understand why it’s such a big hurdle to have upstream driver for a SoC - usually Qualcomm makes the chip and probably the drivers for a given chipset.

I don’t understand why it’s such a big hurdle to have upstream driver for a SoC - usually Qualcomm makes the chip and probably the drivers for a given chipset. They are the only ones whose responsibility it would be to have an upstream kernel driver. If intel, amd or others can make it so that their very complicated silicon can run on top of open source code, it should be possible for them as well. Granted, the phone manufacturers would probably further customize the kernel, however, the phones could still run on top of code that is 99 percent upstream, and they could both spare a lot of dev resources and stay closer to upstream.

AdrianB1 4y ago
I think the Intel and AMD situation (and Cyrix and VIA in the past) is exactly opposite: open source was build on their public ISA. Qualcomm does not build SoCs for open source, they build SoCs and don't even want to open source the drivers for it, reverse engineering is too complicated or not worth (as SoC changes too often), so third parties cannot write open source drivers.
lupire 4y ago
Qualcomm sells more chips when the software fails after 2-3 years and consumers by a new phone. So they don't maintain drivers.