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What's up with still no Linux on snapdragon laptops? Is qualcomm not supporting it?
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this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2024
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I'm pretty sure some basic stuff is running on the Windows Dev Kit 2023 (no thanks to Qualcomm), which is very similar. See https://www.phoronix.com/news/Windows-Dev-Kit-2023-Linux
I wonder if the endgame for getting Linux running on these freakasauruses is not to create a custom UEFI firmware for each laptop that could abstract away the differences between each laptop with an ACPI API, rather that modifying the kernel itself.
It sounds daunting, but people have done it for the Raspberry Pi before. I don't think it runs as actual firmware on the device - I think it's just an ARM binary that could then execute and provide abstraction for a bootloader.
There are difficulties with that, obviously. For one, the Raspberry Pi is one hardware platform, and a Broadcom-based one at that. Still, I can't imagine that you'd have to redo everything from scratch on every platform; it'd basically just be something like a device tree to define the ACPI info built into every firmware build variant. If this idea worked, people could just have an environment to install an operating system on that is almost like a normal UEFI PC but with ARM.
Truth be told though, I kind of wish Ampere would get more into the consumer space; I feel like they have the least insane configuration of almost any ARM device, being users of UEFI. I don't know if they could viably scale down from their 192 core beasts, though. Now that BNL song is going through my head. "If I had a million dollars, I'd buy an Ampere workstation; a power-hungry ARM beast."