3 ms·

OpenBSD added initial support for Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite X after 1 day

35 points by ecliptik 2y ago

jasoneckert 2y ago
This is incredibly impressive. I've always hoped that a powerful ARM-based BSD laptop would be a reality one day, but never thought it would happen. Having a standard platform with support/documentation from the vendor could mean that Snapdragon Elite X could be a solid choice that is easy to support from an OS maintainer point of view.
- walterbell 2y ago
  Arm is aiming for ~50% of the PC market in 5 years. Mediatek's Arm laptop SoC should be released next year. AMD and Nvidia are also rumored to be working on Arm laptop SoCs.
- _mlbt 2y ago
  Technically you just described an M-series MacBook. Even if you don’t like the BSD-derived genuine certified UNIX that is macOS, they are also supported by OpenBSD and NetBSD. Work is also underway to add support for FreeBSD. https://www.openbsd.org/arm64.html https://www.openbsd.org/arm64.html https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/evbarm/apple/ https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/evbarm/apple/ https://wiki.freebsd.org/AppleSilicon https://wiki.freebsd.org/AppleSilicon
  - daghamm 2y ago
    I don't think Apple in any official capacity helps these efforts. Lenovo on the other hand seems to support alternative OSes to some degree.
  - DEADMINCE 2y ago
    > BSD-derived genuine certified UNIX To be fair, that never really mattered.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tiffanyh 2y ago
Dumb question ... If an OS already supported ARM64, which Elite X is, why would any more work need to be done to support it?
- ComputerGuru 2y ago
  ARM isn’t like x86 and generally doesn’t self-describe its hardware via some specification or interface. Admittedly it’s not a crazy amount of work at a baseline, but device-specific information needs to be added for the kernel to understand address maps, available peripherals, linker shenanigans, and more. This is (partiallly) what device tree overlay blobs are for on Linux (and why you can’t just run Windows/AARCH64 on any hardware of your choosing).
  - gjsman-1000 2y ago
    This is also because ACPI is a very heavy and painful specification that even regular computer manufacturers don’t get right. For example, just recently, I bought a HP Victus 15 with an RTX 3050. Tried installing Linux, turns out there’s a BIOS bug with the ACPI implementation, with no currently documented fix, that completely breaks wake from sleep. Even though Windows runs on basically anything without a Device Tree; it’s something of an illusion. Old Windows builds might not run on modern processors despite the same instruction set (Windows XP won’t install on a 12700K), and Windows automatically downloading drivers covers up many things before you notice.
    - ComputerGuru 2y ago
      True. But that’s really just another way of saying “at worst, ACPI can still require a small amount of the work that is always required for ARM hardware” if you squint and look at it from a glass-half-full perspective!
      - gjsman-1000 2y ago
        I still like ACPI, don’t get me wrong, for what it does. At the same time though, there is argument to be had for “we wrote a device tree, therefore it works” versus “it 95% works, good enough, so nobody’s going to fix the rest anytime soon.” ARM is attempting to fix this with a certification program called SystemReady SR; but it’s optional and hasn’t caught on outside of servers.
brynet 2y ago
Patrick shared an early dmesg showing OpenBSD booting on the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7, for those curious about the hardware and driver support so far. https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=171883671113138&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=171883671113138&w=2
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

35 points by ecliptik 2y ago

This is incredibly impressive. I've always hoped that a powerful ARM-based BSD laptop would be a reality one day, but never thought it would happen. Having a standard platform with support/documentation from the vendor could mean that Snapdragon Elite X could be a solid choice that is easy to support from an OS maintainer point of view.

walterbell 2y ago
Arm is aiming for ~50% of the PC market in 5 years. Mediatek's Arm laptop SoC should be released next year. AMD and Nvidia are also rumored to be working on Arm laptop SoCs.
_mlbt 2y ago
Technically you just described an M-series MacBook. Even if you don’t like the BSD-derived genuine certified UNIX that is macOS, they are also supported by OpenBSD and NetBSD. Work is also underway to add support for FreeBSD. https://www.openbsd.org/arm64.html https://www.openbsd.org/arm64.html https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/evbarm/apple/ https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/evbarm/apple/ https://wiki.freebsd.org/AppleSilicon https://wiki.freebsd.org/AppleSilicon
- daghamm 2y ago
  I don't think Apple in any official capacity helps these efforts. Lenovo on the other hand seems to support alternative OSes to some degree.
- DEADMINCE 2y ago
  > BSD-derived genuine certified UNIX To be fair, that never really mattered.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

tiffanyh 2y ago

Dumb question ... If an OS already supported ARM64, which Elite X is, why would any more work need to be done to support it?

ComputerGuru 2y ago
ARM isn’t like x86 and generally doesn’t self-describe its hardware via some specification or interface. Admittedly it’s not a crazy amount of work at a baseline, but device-specific information needs to be added for the kernel to understand address maps, available peripherals, linker shenanigans, and more. This is (partiallly) what device tree overlay blobs are for on Linux (and why you can’t just run Windows/AARCH64 on any hardware of your choosing).
- gjsman-1000 2y ago
  This is also because ACPI is a very heavy and painful specification that even regular computer manufacturers don’t get right. For example, just recently, I bought a HP Victus 15 with an RTX 3050. Tried installing Linux, turns out there’s a BIOS bug with the ACPI implementation, with no currently documented fix, that completely breaks wake from sleep. Even though Windows runs on basically anything without a Device Tree; it’s something of an illusion. Old Windows builds might not run on modern processors despite the same instruction set (Windows XP won’t install on a 12700K), and Windows automatically downloading drivers covers up many things before you notice.
  - ComputerGuru 2y ago
    True. But that’s really just another way of saying “at worst, ACPI can still require a small amount of the work that is always required for ARM hardware” if you squint and look at it from a glass-half-full perspective!
    - gjsman-1000 2y ago
      I still like ACPI, don’t get me wrong, for what it does. At the same time though, there is argument to be had for “we wrote a device tree, therefore it works” versus “it 95% works, good enough, so nobody’s going to fix the rest anytime soon.” ARM is attempting to fix this with a certification program called SystemReady SR; but it’s optional and hasn’t caught on outside of servers.

brynet 2y ago

Patrick shared an early dmesg showing OpenBSD booting on the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7, for those curious about the hardware and driver support so far. https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=171883671113138&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=171883671113138&w=2

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]