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How does Ubuntu Linux on recent Qualcomm (ex-Apple Nuvia) Arm laptops compare to Asahi Linux on Apple Silicon?

jauntywundrkind 6mo ago
Pretty rude to call this ex Apple Nuvia. I don't think any of those lawsuits by Apple or ARM have been won. Qualcomm declares this to be a new chip. But yes it has talent from those places. Still, let's not try to tip the scales of perception quite so indelicately? I am curious what the boot situation is. It seems like Qualcomm actually has pretty good support for their cores. But since these PC systems sort of lack a bios, each one needing a hand built DeviceTree: it makes supporting them kind of a nightmare. Even a raspberry pi has a much more advanced and accommodating boot environment than these frustrating Qualcomm laptops. Alas. I don't know but I expect Asahi has to do similar hand tailoring. I am curious to know what the boot chain looks like! How much the system willingly helps vs how much hard to be bespoke hand coded system config! (Wish it wasn't like this, it's so bad)
- appplication 6mo ago
  Without stirring the pot too much, I’m a bit out of the loop on what the above poster implied and you took slight to. Could you share a little more about this and why you feel what they said was rude?
  - wtallis 6mo ago
    There's nothing rude about it; the Nuvia CPU core is pretty much the entire selling point of the Snapdragon X Elite product family. Everything else on those chips is underwhelming. But the provenance of the CPU core is really irrelevant to the question of Linux support, which is gated by driver support for the rest of the SoC, which didn't come from Nuvia. So focusing on the Nuvia aspect is a bit of a red herring.
    - walterbell 6mo ago
      > bit of a red herring It offers an A/B test of "similar" SoC performance and battery life (which users now expect from laptops), without a vertically integrated operating system that was also created by the company who designed the SoC.
    - Danox 6mo ago
      Qualcomm may be a tech company, but they behave more like a pack of lawyers (probably the best in the tech business at extracting money” double dipping”) they will never support Linux in any usable way, not without a huge ongoing fee/payola on their so called partners.
      - jauntywundrkind 6mo ago
        That certainly is what their past looked like! And in many ways that probably is true. But it's not uninform. There's a lot of places where Qualcomm is clearly working very hard to get upstream, to get mainline support. https://www.phoronix.com/search/Qualcomm https://www.phoronix.com/search/Qualcomm I was super impressed with their work offloading sound to a USB sound card, to let the CPU sleep more. Really wild subsystem to build. And they did it! Kept at it! Really cool stuff to have in the kernel. They've hired some good people for GPU support, which is rad. I feel like Qualcomm is so so close to having a great system people can genuinely love. But there's always some missing pieces, it's always an end result that is far far far quirkier and more difficult than a PC would be. Some of the other comments in this thread give me some hope that there is a more normal boot chain here at least, that it's other troubles. But it's hard. And Qualcomm only has so much power over what their OEM partners actually build. Qualcomm is the only name in wifi right now for OpenWRT like systems. MediaTek looks good, is present too, but supposedly their drivers are just a total garbage fire, buggy & crash tastic beyond words. I think it's important we reassess our old biases. And give some credit where due. Qualcomm has an absolutely forsaken reputation & their lawyerliness is a thing of legend, forbidding as heck. But there are also a lot of signs that at least some of the company is tired of making chips that are utterly unsupportable, and has some real drive towards good open source support. Thank you, warriors of light there. Really hoping we see some Linux running Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme units in the next 12 months. Looks like an amazing system! Good job engineering the new cores ya'll!! Amazing performance.
  - saagarjha 6mo ago
    Apple and ARM have sued Qualcomm over the Nuvia talent.
- walterbell 6mo ago
  Circular talent economy, https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/legendary-qualcomm-apple-and-nuvia-alumni-form-new-cpu-startup-nuvacore-promises-to-rewrite-the-rules-of-silicon https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/legendary-qu... Just several months after leaving Qualcomm, distinguished CPU and system architects Gerard Williams, John Bruno, and Ram Srinivasan, who are celebrated for their high-performance processors developed at Apple, Nuvia, and, more recently, Qualcomm, established a new CPU startup — Nuvacore — that promises no less than to 'rewrite the rules of silicon.'
  - glaslong 6mo ago
    Seems like a good thing, no? People getting paid well to skip around and improve products across the board. A virtuosos cycle, as opposed to the cynical cycle of ruining one project and parachuting to the next.
    - walterbell 6mo ago
      Also keeps lawyers busy.
- bri3d 6mo ago
  > these PC systems sort of lack a bios, each one needing a hand built DeviceTree: it makes supporting them kind of a nightmare. Modern PC ARM systems like Snapdragon Elite X use UEFI and ACPI. This is actually what makes them difficult, because they're trying to operate in a "new world" while most ARM SOC IP and peripheral drivers work in the "old world." The issue with ARM has never _really_ been early boot; yes, it's arcane and a pain in the butt on some platforms, but it really only needs to be done once - once your DRAM is trained and running (this is usually the hardest part) and you can load and jump into a kernel, you're set. Hypervisor / security processor driven systems like Qualcomm (and for that matter, Intel and AMD) actually make this even easier at the expense of openness, because the vendor blob usually brought everything up for you already. The issue has always been hardware discovery and mutable device configuration. When ARM devices were first supported by Linux, they were mostly embedded devices with one configuration, ever. So, they used devicetree, which is a fixed structure for each board, defined before boot and provided by the bootloader. Because of this, most SOC / platform / IP soft-core drivers were built to work with fixed, proprietary configurations and usually only tested against a single platform to start. On the other hand, x86 devices have been forced to work as highly mutable, arbitrary combinations of hardware (Plug n Play) with dynamic reconfiguration using ACPI since the start, so the drivers for x86 peripherals have always had to cope with a completely unpredictable environment. What this means is that there's a ton of effort required to transition ARM _peripheral drivers_ from the "devicetree" world where drivers took fixed arbitrary, proprietary key=value parameters provided by a magic blob at boot to the ACPI world, where everything is dynamic, scripted, and abstract. I'd actually argue that Pi have the most hacked tooling on top of the "old devicetree way," which means they're the most set on it. Pi peripherals are usually configured at pre-boot time using devicetree overlays and their drivers usually don't support any kind of probing/autodiscovery. As far as I know there's no real plan to change this (and maybe there doesn't have to be; it seems to work for them). Anyway, this is all to say: I don't think the issue with either system is the "boot situation," it's the "peripheral configuration situation." In this sense, Asahi are actually in a fine situation to use devicetrees, which they do, because basically all of the SOC peripherals are proprietary and there are a fixed number of Apple devices to target and the only external interfaces are existing hot plug standards (USB/Thunderbolt/HDMI/DP). Qualcomm are smart to have started to try to use ACPI, because their SoCs could be hosted on boards with standard peripherals configured in thousands of different ways, like all PCs. But, they're playing on hard mode because most of the existing ARM peripheral drivers weren't made to support this model.
- Danox 6mo ago
  Qualcomm at its heart is a patent troll company. They and Microsoft actually deserve each other. Long-term their partnership will end in tears. BecauseMicrosoft is at this time in different to the Surface computers they are all in on copilot. It is basically copilot or bust for Microsoft.
neobrain 6mo ago
Most people don't realize that the Asahi team ship features only once they work without quirks. For the set of supported hardware features, Asahi is much closer to a macOS experience than to an average x86 Linux laptop experience. Meanwhile, Linux on my Lenovo X13s "works" but has tons of quirks: Boot fails 2 out of 3 times, the device hard-resets sometimes when waking up with a display connected, and the speakers are unusable due to lack of active overheat protection (and somehow this affects even external speakers). It technically works, but it's incredibly frustrating to use in practice. If you plan to use Linux and don't need an ARM laptop, there's little reason to prefer a Qualcomm device over an x86 one currently. On the other hand, M1/M2 easily outperform a broad class of x86 laptops, and they have a Linux experience that's for many use cases close to on par with official vendor support.

Pretty rude to call this ex Apple Nuvia. I don't think any of those lawsuits by Apple or ARM have been won. Qualcomm declares this to be a new chip. But yes it has talent from those places. Still, let's not try to tip the scales of perception quite so indelicately? I am curious what the boot situation is. It seems like Qualcomm actually has pretty good support for their cores. But since these PC systems sort of lack a bios, each one needing a hand built DeviceTree: it makes supporting them kind of a nightmare. Even a raspberry pi has a much more advanced and accommodating boot environment than these frustrating Qualcomm laptops. Alas. I don't know but I expect Asahi has to do similar hand tailoring. I am curious to know what the boot chain looks like! How much the system willingly helps vs how much hard to be bespoke hand coded system config! (Wish it wasn't like this, it's so bad)

appplication 6mo ago
Without stirring the pot too much, I’m a bit out of the loop on what the above poster implied and you took slight to. Could you share a little more about this and why you feel what they said was rude?
- wtallis 6mo ago
  There's nothing rude about it; the Nuvia CPU core is pretty much the entire selling point of the Snapdragon X Elite product family. Everything else on those chips is underwhelming. But the provenance of the CPU core is really irrelevant to the question of Linux support, which is gated by driver support for the rest of the SoC, which didn't come from Nuvia. So focusing on the Nuvia aspect is a bit of a red herring.
  - walterbell 6mo ago
    > bit of a red herring It offers an A/B test of "similar" SoC performance and battery life (which users now expect from laptops), without a vertically integrated operating system that was also created by the company who designed the SoC.
  - Danox 6mo ago
    Qualcomm may be a tech company, but they behave more like a pack of lawyers (probably the best in the tech business at extracting money” double dipping”) they will never support Linux in any usable way, not without a huge ongoing fee/payola on their so called partners.
    - jauntywundrkind 6mo ago
      That certainly is what their past looked like! And in many ways that probably is true. But it's not uninform. There's a lot of places where Qualcomm is clearly working very hard to get upstream, to get mainline support. https://www.phoronix.com/search/Qualcomm https://www.phoronix.com/search/Qualcomm I was super impressed with their work offloading sound to a USB sound card, to let the CPU sleep more. Really wild subsystem to build. And they did it! Kept at it! Really cool stuff to have in the kernel. They've hired some good people for GPU support, which is rad. I feel like Qualcomm is so so close to having a great system people can genuinely love. But there's always some missing pieces, it's always an end result that is far far far quirkier and more difficult than a PC would be. Some of the other comments in this thread give me some hope that there is a more normal boot chain here at least, that it's other troubles. But it's hard. And Qualcomm only has so much power over what their OEM partners actually build. Qualcomm is the only name in wifi right now for OpenWRT like systems. MediaTek looks good, is present too, but supposedly their drivers are just a total garbage fire, buggy & crash tastic beyond words. I think it's important we reassess our old biases. And give some credit where due. Qualcomm has an absolutely forsaken reputation & their lawyerliness is a thing of legend, forbidding as heck. But there are also a lot of signs that at least some of the company is tired of making chips that are utterly unsupportable, and has some real drive towards good open source support. Thank you, warriors of light there. Really hoping we see some Linux running Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme units in the next 12 months. Looks like an amazing system! Good job engineering the new cores ya'll!! Amazing performance.
- saagarjha 6mo ago
  Apple and ARM have sued Qualcomm over the Nuvia talent.
walterbell 6mo ago
Circular talent economy, https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/legendary-qualcomm-apple-and-nuvia-alumni-form-new-cpu-startup-nuvacore-promises-to-rewrite-the-rules-of-silicon https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/legendary-qu... Just several months after leaving Qualcomm, distinguished CPU and system architects Gerard Williams, John Bruno, and Ram Srinivasan, who are celebrated for their high-performance processors developed at Apple, Nuvia, and, more recently, Qualcomm, established a new CPU startup — Nuvacore — that promises no less than to 'rewrite the rules of silicon.'
- glaslong 6mo ago
  Seems like a good thing, no? People getting paid well to skip around and improve products across the board. A virtuosos cycle, as opposed to the cynical cycle of ruining one project and parachuting to the next.
  - walterbell 6mo ago
    Also keeps lawyers busy.
bri3d 6mo ago
> these PC systems sort of lack a bios, each one needing a hand built DeviceTree: it makes supporting them kind of a nightmare. Modern PC ARM systems like Snapdragon Elite X use UEFI and ACPI. This is actually what makes them difficult, because they're trying to operate in a "new world" while most ARM SOC IP and peripheral drivers work in the "old world." The issue with ARM has never _really_ been early boot; yes, it's arcane and a pain in the butt on some platforms, but it really only needs to be done once - once your DRAM is trained and running (this is usually the hardest part) and you can load and jump into a kernel, you're set. Hypervisor / security processor driven systems like Qualcomm (and for that matter, Intel and AMD) actually make this even easier at the expense of openness, because the vendor blob usually brought everything up for you already. The issue has always been hardware discovery and mutable device configuration. When ARM devices were first supported by Linux, they were mostly embedded devices with one configuration, ever. So, they used devicetree, which is a fixed structure for each board, defined before boot and provided by the bootloader. Because of this, most SOC / platform / IP soft-core drivers were built to work with fixed, proprietary configurations and usually only tested against a single platform to start. On the other hand, x86 devices have been forced to work as highly mutable, arbitrary combinations of hardware (Plug n Play) with dynamic reconfiguration using ACPI since the start, so the drivers for x86 peripherals have always had to cope with a completely unpredictable environment. What this means is that there's a ton of effort required to transition ARM _peripheral drivers_ from the "devicetree" world where drivers took fixed arbitrary, proprietary key=value parameters provided by a magic blob at boot to the ACPI world, where everything is dynamic, scripted, and abstract. I'd actually argue that Pi have the most hacked tooling on top of the "old devicetree way," which means they're the most set on it. Pi peripherals are usually configured at pre-boot time using devicetree overlays and their drivers usually don't support any kind of probing/autodiscovery. As far as I know there's no real plan to change this (and maybe there doesn't have to be; it seems to work for them). Anyway, this is all to say: I don't think the issue with either system is the "boot situation," it's the "peripheral configuration situation." In this sense, Asahi are actually in a fine situation to use devicetrees, which they do, because basically all of the SOC peripherals are proprietary and there are a fixed number of Apple devices to target and the only external interfaces are existing hot plug standards (USB/Thunderbolt/HDMI/DP). Qualcomm are smart to have started to try to use ACPI, because their SoCs could be hosted on boards with standard peripherals configured in thousands of different ways, like all PCs. But, they're playing on hard mode because most of the existing ARM peripheral drivers weren't made to support this model.
Danox 6mo ago
Qualcomm at its heart is a patent troll company. They and Microsoft actually deserve each other. Long-term their partnership will end in tears. BecauseMicrosoft is at this time in different to the Surface computers they are all in on copilot. It is basically copilot or bust for Microsoft.

neobrain 6mo ago

Most people don't realize that the Asahi team ship features only once they work without quirks. For the set of supported hardware features, Asahi is much closer to a macOS experience than to an average x86 Linux laptop experience. Meanwhile, Linux on my Lenovo X13s "works" but has tons of quirks: Boot fails 2 out of 3 times, the device hard-resets sometimes when waking up with a display connected, and the speakers are unusable due to lack of active overheat protection (and somehow this affects even external speakers). It technically works, but it's incredibly frustrating to use in practice. If you plan to use Linux and don't need an ARM laptop, there's little reason to prefer a Qualcomm device over an x86 one currently. On the other hand, M1/M2 easily outperform a broad class of x86 laptops, and they have a Linux experience that's for many use cases close to on par with official vendor support.