6 ms·

Qualcomm hardware support increasingly in good shape with Linux kernel

61 points by quic_bcain 3y ago

ranguna 3y ago
Can't wait to switch my laptop to a phone running full Linux. Imagine just walking around with one normal phone and one phone that you can hook to with xreal glasses, connect that phone to a remote server and you got yourself all the power you want in your hands (provided you have good Internet).
- pjmlp 3y ago
  OpenMoko, Ubuntu Touch, N900, Sailfish,....
- fsflover 3y ago
  Here you go: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 or https://pine64.org/devices/pinephone https://pine64.org/devices/pinephone.
  - ranguna 3y ago
    Las time I checked, the battery on those was horrible because the cpu just uses too much power. Hence why I'm waiting for SD 8 support, plus SD is much faster, just in case I'm somewhere with low connectivity and need to run vscode (electron behemoth) locally. Thanks for the suggestions though!
    - fsflover 3y ago
      https://forums.puri.sm/t/i-am-getting-17h-of-battery-time-on-my-librem5-are-you/21889 https://forums.puri.sm/t/i-am-getting-17h-of-battery-time-on... https://forums.puri.sm/t/i-am-getting-17h-of-battery-time-on-my-librem5-are-you/21889/17 https://forums.puri.sm/t/i-am-getting-17h-of-battery-time-on...
      - ranguna 3y ago
        https://forums.puri.sm/t/i-am-getting-17h-of-battery-time-on-my-librem5-are-you/21889/10 https://forums.puri.sm/t/i-am-getting-17h-of-battery-time-on... https://www.reddit.com/r/oneplus/comments/199uhzt/comment/kik3916/ https://www.reddit.com/r/oneplus/comments/199uhzt/comment/ki... https://www.reddit.com/r/oneplus/comments/199uhzt/comment/kqv5t72/ https://www.reddit.com/r/oneplus/comments/199uhzt/comment/kq...
        fsflover 3y ago
        Fair enough. Sufficiently good for me though (my daily driver).
        ranguna 3y ago
        Nice!! Hope you don't mind me firing a bunch of questions Do you use it as "just" a smartphone or as a laptop substitute? And how much screen on time do you get? How long does it take to charge? Have you tried using steam link? What OS/ROM/disto do you have installed on it?
        fsflover 3y ago
        First of all, it feels unbelievably freeing to run desktop GNU/Linux on my phone and benefit from the full command line (e.g., ssh and sshfs on the go are extremely helpful) and desktop Firefox, without stupid limitations of "ordinary" smartphones. I tried to use it as a laptop. It works fine for non-heavy tasks, but not sufficiently secure for me (I prefer Qubes OS). It is very helpful for doing some configuration though. See also: https://forums.puri.sm/t/anyone-using-the-l5-as-their-main-computer/22654 https://forums.puri.sm/t/anyone-using-the-l5-as-their-main-c... I get maybe 3-4 hours of heavy browsing. Usually, when I'm using the phone a lot, it lasts half a day. Also, the background apps are not frozen like on Android/iOS and can drain the battery very quickly if you don't close them. The good news is that you can replace the battery without tools and instantly get 100% charge again. It can charge in about three hours with the original charger, but I often use other chargers, which are slower (e.g., it can take 6 hours or more during the night). See also: https://forums.puri.sm/t/usb-dcp-5v-1-5a-protocol-and-librem-5/17637/2 https://forums.puri.sm/t/usb-dcp-5v-1-5a-protocol-and-librem... I didn't try steam link. I tried to install Mobian. It works but the functionality lags (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39155229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39155229) behind the default PureOS, which I use. The software is still under heavy development and the phone is still getting longer battery life and smoother UI. See also: https://forums.puri.sm/t/librem-5-daily-driven-in-professional-use-success/22303 https://forums.puri.sm/t/librem-5-daily-driven-in-profession..., https://forums.puri.sm/t/librem-5-daily-driven-in-professional-use-success/22303/40 https://forums.puri.sm/t/librem-5-daily-driven-in-profession....
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
There really has been a huge shift for Qualcomm, and it's great to see. It's so interesting to me to guess how and where this is happening, what the pressure points are driving this. It feels like there's two areas that have been highly motivated to make Qualcomm more than good for limited-lifetime appliances running unmaintained kernel. First around were the motivated hobbyists, namely, OpenWRT. OpenWRT already had a close relationship with part of Qualcomm: the Atheros (acquired by Qualcomm in 2011 for $3.1B) wifi chipsets were the linux wifi chips to have. But as MIPS faded and ARM rose, Qualcomm become more and more dominant in OpenWRT space. Trying to port vendor SDKs and drivers in, and then work on more upstream support, has been a long running OpenWRT project. I myself own a number of Nighthawk X4S/R7800 (IPQ4019 chipset, 802.11ac wave-2) routers (Maybe soon time to move on, if only there were good options!). Those efforts to upstream are really getting to a good spot these past couple years. ipq40xx was ok but rough. After some kind of iffy early chip releases that seem destined to never be supported, most recent ipq80xx chipsets with 802.11ax/wifi6 seem well supported on mainline. But it's still not ideal: Qualcomm has a bunch of iptables-bypassing network-processing offloading support for the +2 of it's 4+2 cores, that is unlikely for OpenWRT to ever support (https://forum.openwrt.org/t/xiaomi-ax3600-performance-thread/151942/31 https://forum.openwrt.org/t/xiaomi-ax3600-performance-thread...). Especially as wifi speeds tick higher it's unlikely new routers will be able to go fast enough unless there's some breakthrough in network-offload, and with great solutions like VPP about it's not impossible, but it seems unlikely & requiring quite a heroic feat to even get started reverse engineering & beginning the process. (Personally it makes me just want to use x86 based routers with m.2 cards for APs & skip Qualcomm cpus.) The other prong of upstreaming comes from a very different place: Google. Specifically Chromebooks, which have really pushed hard for support to get upstreamed on supported platforms. I think it might now be an out and out requirement to have upstream support! This added real weight to the drive to upstream. We also see MediaTek having done amazing things with getting their stuff upstreamed, often seeing chips consumers wont see for years getting kernel support, with many of the target boards becoming future Chromebooks. Chips like the 8cx were pretty early onboard here. The chip here is more phone oriented, a Snapdragon Gen 3. Things seemed to really start going much faster a year or two back. Looking at PostmarketOS, the support matrix really isn't bad for mainline kernels and top-tier chips (https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Qualcomm_mainline_porting https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Qualcomm_mainline_porting)! I'd love to see support expanded for lower-market chips (such as the 7+ Gen 2, https://www.anandtech.com/show/18775/qualcomm-announces-snapdragon-7-gen-2-premium-segment-gets-a-cortexx-core https://www.anandtech.com/show/18775/qualcomm-announces-snap...), which looks like it'd be a great mid-range tablet/small desktop core, if supported. It's still quite hazy to me how much Qualcomm is actually supporting/helping these efforts, versus how much is paid or free open source work. But, the future is exciting. Being able to run non-Android OSes really starts here. I don't know what specifically the changes will be, but able to have devices evolve & change beyond just being consumer appliances opens the doors of possibility, to new forms of computing. Letting folks adapt & change systems around them keeps giving rise to exciting new things, and I'm for it!
jacooper 3y ago
I was excited for the upcoming snapdragon X elite till I saw this > But still a work-in-progress is audio support, DP Alt-Mode, enabling the DSPs, USB-C power delivery, and GPU acceleration No GPU acceleration? And somehow this is seen as good support?! The reverse engineered Asahi Linux driver has better support than whatever this is.
- protastus 3y ago
  100% agree with you. Qualcomm historically wrote awful OSS code that couldn't be upstreamed because it barely worked on a subset of their own SoCs, and broke basic function for everything else. Typically featuring incredibly invasive architectural changes that patched far too many layers of the OS with unmaintainable code. QC then converted bad code into a business model, nickel and diming OEMs who needed bugs fixed to ship their products. The idea that QC SoCs now have good upstream support is bizarre to me. At best, it means a few high volume SoCs can boot to console on reference designs. Forget about peripheral support for things anyone would take for granted, like audio and GPU.
  - zozbot234 3y ago
    Every mainline-supported device starts out as "booting to console". GPU support on ARM SoC's is currently achieved through a variety of community-developed drivers, such as lima and panfrost. That part at least is comparatively well-understood. The manufacturer does not directly support these community drivers, so it's not very clear how much Qualcomm could help there.
    - protastus 3y ago
      There are so many ways they could help. For GPU, they could support freedreno (both the kernel and Mesa parts) instead of KGSL and the closed source Adreno libraries. A great start would be to make the user space Adreno GLES libraries talk to the freedreno DRM backend. So one could use the QC proprietary GLES libs with a mainline kernel without rebuilding with KGSL. There's a similar story here for every subsystem driver, where they insist on a brittle proprietary solutions (one branch for every chip!) that can't be upstreamed.
dirkf 3y ago
On a related note: I have the impression Broadcom is more and more losing terrain to the likes of Qualcomm and Mediatek. A couple of years ago nearly everybody was using Broadcom chips in their products (or at least in the consumer-grade telecom devices I'm familiar with as part of my job). Now I'm seeing a shift away from them. I can't really say if it's due to better features, price, vendor support, open source support, documentation, or perhaps all of the above. In any case, some competition is certainly welcome.
- unmole 3y ago
  On the other hand, Broadcom is dominant in high end network gear. The only real competition was Tofino which Intel killed off.
- stragies 3y ago
  If you check out the forum.openwrt.org, you'll see, that broadcom support is mostly limited to Raspberry PI devices, and some 400Mhz museum pieces. 9/10 times the turned-down requests for OpenWrt support of Device XY are because of Broadcom SOCs/Wireless_chips in the device.
- bgnn 3y ago
  it's because of the CEO Hock Tan. Broadcom became a sort of investment fund rather than an engineering company. Hock even wanted to buy Qualcomm but got blocked by Trump. This was because it was very likely Hock would just divide it into pieces, cut R&D and start charging 2-3x more for the existing products like he did for Broadcom, symantec, CA techmologies and now vmware. He even sued Broadcom customers like VW.. Despite all this its stock is rising and rising..
  - Gibbon1 3y ago
    If you asked for my reflexive feeling about using a Broadcom chip in a new design the answer is you're asking to be in a abusive relationship with a supplier.
    - unmole 3y ago
seba_dos1 3y ago
One thing I noted from the FOSDEM talk is that even though Qualcomm supports mainlining through Linaro, it's done based on existing code (both NDAed and public) and there's close to no documentation provided neither publicly nor privately to the devs. When you'll happen to work on that code in the future in mainline Linux trying to catch some bug, all you'll have to cross-check things with may be the same buggy code you try to fix - so in the end it's just like it would be reverse engineered, but without all the notes that community may have produced while trying to understand the thing.

61 points by quic_bcain 3y ago

Can't wait to switch my laptop to a phone running full Linux. Imagine just walking around with one normal phone and one phone that you can hook to with xreal glasses, connect that phone to a remote server and you got yourself all the power you want in your hands (provided you have good Internet).

pjmlp 3y ago
OpenMoko, Ubuntu Touch, N900, Sailfish,....
fsflover 3y ago
Here you go: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 or https://pine64.org/devices/pinephone https://pine64.org/devices/pinephone.
- ranguna 3y ago
  Las time I checked, the battery on those was horrible because the cpu just uses too much power. Hence why I'm waiting for SD 8 support, plus SD is much faster, just in case I'm somewhere with low connectivity and need to run vscode (electron behemoth) locally. Thanks for the suggestions though!
  - fsflover 3y ago
    https://forums.puri.sm/t/i-am-getting-17h-of-battery-time-on-my-librem5-are-you/21889 https://forums.puri.sm/t/i-am-getting-17h-of-battery-time-on... https://forums.puri.sm/t/i-am-getting-17h-of-battery-time-on-my-librem5-are-you/21889/17 https://forums.puri.sm/t/i-am-getting-17h-of-battery-time-on...
    - ranguna 3y ago
      https://forums.puri.sm/t/i-am-getting-17h-of-battery-time-on-my-librem5-are-you/21889/10 https://forums.puri.sm/t/i-am-getting-17h-of-battery-time-on... https://www.reddit.com/r/oneplus/comments/199uhzt/comment/kik3916/ https://www.reddit.com/r/oneplus/comments/199uhzt/comment/ki... https://www.reddit.com/r/oneplus/comments/199uhzt/comment/kqv5t72/ https://www.reddit.com/r/oneplus/comments/199uhzt/comment/kq...
      - fsflover 3y ago
        Fair enough. Sufficiently good for me though (my daily driver).
        ranguna 3y ago
        Nice!! Hope you don't mind me firing a bunch of questions Do you use it as "just" a smartphone or as a laptop substitute? And how much screen on time do you get? How long does it take to charge? Have you tried using steam link? What OS/ROM/disto do you have installed on it?
        fsflover 3y ago
        First of all, it feels unbelievably freeing to run desktop GNU/Linux on my phone and benefit from the full command line (e.g., ssh and sshfs on the go are extremely helpful) and desktop Firefox, without stupid limitations of "ordinary" smartphones. I tried to use it as a laptop. It works fine for non-heavy tasks, but not sufficiently secure for me (I prefer Qubes OS). It is very helpful for doing some configuration though. See also: https://forums.puri.sm/t/anyone-using-the-l5-as-their-main-computer/22654 https://forums.puri.sm/t/anyone-using-the-l5-as-their-main-c... I get maybe 3-4 hours of heavy browsing. Usually, when I'm using the phone a lot, it lasts half a day. Also, the background apps are not frozen like on Android/iOS and can drain the battery very quickly if you don't close them. The good news is that you can replace the battery without tools and instantly get 100% charge again. It can charge in about three hours with the original charger, but I often use other chargers, which are slower (e.g., it can take 6 hours or more during the night). See also: https://forums.puri.sm/t/usb-dcp-5v-1-5a-protocol-and-librem-5/17637/2 https://forums.puri.sm/t/usb-dcp-5v-1-5a-protocol-and-librem... I didn't try steam link. I tried to install Mobian. It works but the functionality lags (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39155229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39155229) behind the default PureOS, which I use. The software is still under heavy development and the phone is still getting longer battery life and smoother UI. See also: https://forums.puri.sm/t/librem-5-daily-driven-in-professional-use-success/22303 https://forums.puri.sm/t/librem-5-daily-driven-in-profession..., https://forums.puri.sm/t/librem-5-daily-driven-in-professional-use-success/22303/40 https://forums.puri.sm/t/librem-5-daily-driven-in-profession....

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

There really has been a huge shift for Qualcomm, and it's great to see. It's so interesting to me to guess how and where this is happening, what the pressure points are driving this. It feels like there's two areas that have been highly motivated to make Qualcomm more than good for limited-lifetime appliances running unmaintained kernel. First around were the motivated hobbyists, namely, OpenWRT. OpenWRT already had a close relationship with part of Qualcomm: the Atheros (acquired by Qualcomm in 2011 for $3.1B) wifi chipsets were the linux wifi chips to have. But as MIPS faded and ARM rose, Qualcomm become more and more dominant in OpenWRT space. Trying to port vendor SDKs and drivers in, and then work on more upstream support, has been a long running OpenWRT project. I myself own a number of Nighthawk X4S/R7800 (IPQ4019 chipset, 802.11ac wave-2) routers (Maybe soon time to move on, if only there were good options!). Those efforts to upstream are really getting to a good spot these past couple years. ipq40xx was ok but rough. After some kind of iffy early chip releases that seem destined to never be supported, most recent ipq80xx chipsets with 802.11ax/wifi6 seem well supported on mainline. But it's still not ideal: Qualcomm has a bunch of iptables-bypassing network-processing offloading support for the +2 of it's 4+2 cores, that is unlikely for OpenWRT to ever support (https://forum.openwrt.org/t/xiaomi-ax3600-performance-thread/151942/31 https://forum.openwrt.org/t/xiaomi-ax3600-performance-thread...). Especially as wifi speeds tick higher it's unlikely new routers will be able to go fast enough unless there's some breakthrough in network-offload, and with great solutions like VPP about it's not impossible, but it seems unlikely & requiring quite a heroic feat to even get started reverse engineering & beginning the process. (Personally it makes me just want to use x86 based routers with m.2 cards for APs & skip Qualcomm cpus.) The other prong of upstreaming comes from a very different place: Google. Specifically Chromebooks, which have really pushed hard for support to get upstreamed on supported platforms. I think it might now be an out and out requirement to have upstream support! This added real weight to the drive to upstream. We also see MediaTek having done amazing things with getting their stuff upstreamed, often seeing chips consumers wont see for years getting kernel support, with many of the target boards becoming future Chromebooks. Chips like the 8cx were pretty early onboard here. The chip here is more phone oriented, a Snapdragon Gen 3. Things seemed to really start going much faster a year or two back. Looking at PostmarketOS, the support matrix really isn't bad for mainline kernels and top-tier chips (https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Qualcomm_mainline_porting https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Qualcomm_mainline_porting)! I'd love to see support expanded for lower-market chips (such as the 7+ Gen 2, https://www.anandtech.com/show/18775/qualcomm-announces-snapdragon-7-gen-2-premium-segment-gets-a-cortexx-core https://www.anandtech.com/show/18775/qualcomm-announces-snap...), which looks like it'd be a great mid-range tablet/small desktop core, if supported. It's still quite hazy to me how much Qualcomm is actually supporting/helping these efforts, versus how much is paid or free open source work. But, the future is exciting. Being able to run non-Android OSes really starts here. I don't know what specifically the changes will be, but able to have devices evolve & change beyond just being consumer appliances opens the doors of possibility, to new forms of computing. Letting folks adapt & change systems around them keeps giving rise to exciting new things, and I'm for it!

jacooper 3y ago

I was excited for the upcoming snapdragon X elite till I saw this > But still a work-in-progress is audio support, DP Alt-Mode, enabling the DSPs, USB-C power delivery, and GPU acceleration No GPU acceleration? And somehow this is seen as good support?! The reverse engineered Asahi Linux driver has better support than whatever this is.

protastus 3y ago
100% agree with you. Qualcomm historically wrote awful OSS code that couldn't be upstreamed because it barely worked on a subset of their own SoCs, and broke basic function for everything else. Typically featuring incredibly invasive architectural changes that patched far too many layers of the OS with unmaintainable code. QC then converted bad code into a business model, nickel and diming OEMs who needed bugs fixed to ship their products. The idea that QC SoCs now have good upstream support is bizarre to me. At best, it means a few high volume SoCs can boot to console on reference designs. Forget about peripheral support for things anyone would take for granted, like audio and GPU.
- zozbot234 3y ago
  Every mainline-supported device starts out as "booting to console". GPU support on ARM SoC's is currently achieved through a variety of community-developed drivers, such as lima and panfrost. That part at least is comparatively well-understood. The manufacturer does not directly support these community drivers, so it's not very clear how much Qualcomm could help there.
  - protastus 3y ago
    There are so many ways they could help. For GPU, they could support freedreno (both the kernel and Mesa parts) instead of KGSL and the closed source Adreno libraries. A great start would be to make the user space Adreno GLES libraries talk to the freedreno DRM backend. So one could use the QC proprietary GLES libs with a mainline kernel without rebuilding with KGSL. There's a similar story here for every subsystem driver, where they insist on a brittle proprietary solutions (one branch for every chip!) that can't be upstreamed.

dirkf 3y ago

On a related note: I have the impression Broadcom is more and more losing terrain to the likes of Qualcomm and Mediatek. A couple of years ago nearly everybody was using Broadcom chips in their products (or at least in the consumer-grade telecom devices I'm familiar with as part of my job). Now I'm seeing a shift away from them. I can't really say if it's due to better features, price, vendor support, open source support, documentation, or perhaps all of the above. In any case, some competition is certainly welcome.

unmole 3y ago
On the other hand, Broadcom is dominant in high end network gear. The only real competition was Tofino which Intel killed off.
stragies 3y ago
If you check out the forum.openwrt.org, you'll see, that broadcom support is mostly limited to Raspberry PI devices, and some 400Mhz museum pieces. 9/10 times the turned-down requests for OpenWrt support of Device XY are because of Broadcom SOCs/Wireless_chips in the device.
bgnn 3y ago
it's because of the CEO Hock Tan. Broadcom became a sort of investment fund rather than an engineering company. Hock even wanted to buy Qualcomm but got blocked by Trump. This was because it was very likely Hock would just divide it into pieces, cut R&D and start charging 2-3x more for the existing products like he did for Broadcom, symantec, CA techmologies and now vmware. He even sued Broadcom customers like VW.. Despite all this its stock is rising and rising..
- Gibbon1 3y ago
  If you asked for my reflexive feeling about using a Broadcom chip in a new design the answer is you're asking to be in a abusive relationship with a supplier.
  - unmole 3y ago

seba_dos1 3y ago

One thing I noted from the FOSDEM talk is that even though Qualcomm supports mainlining through Linaro, it's done based on existing code (both NDAed and public) and there's close to no documentation provided neither publicly nor privately to the devs. When you'll happen to work on that code in the future in mainline Linux trying to catch some bug, all you'll have to cross-check things with may be the same buggy code you try to fix - so in the end it's just like it would be reverse engineered, but without all the notes that community may have produced while trying to understand the thing.