Linux patches for RAS support on Qualcomm platforms

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The ecosystem of Qualcomm ARM hardware and the Linux kernel is experiencing a key moment for the Linux system administrationOn one hand, the company is pushing hard to ensure its next-generation SoCs, such as the Snapdragon X Elite and other ARM64 chips, have top-tier support in the main kernel. On the other hand, the Linux community and some manufacturers are encountering very clear limitations regarding firmware, BIOS, virtualization, and long-term support.

In this context, Linux patches for RAS support and other features on Qualcomm platforms They have become a strategic piece: not only do they enable basic things like NVMe storage or audio, but they also lay the foundation for critical features such as reliability, security, virtualization or long-term support for laptops and other ARM-based devices.

Qualcomm, ARM, and the race to conquer the desktop with Linux

The classical domain of AMD and Intel in the PC world It is increasingly challenged by the ARM offensive. Qualcomm and Apple have demonstrated that tremendously powerful and efficient SoCs can be designed for laptops and desktops, and the next logical step is to ensure that these chips work just as well on Linux as they do on Windows.

In the specific case of Qualcomm, the company has begun to send a large volume of patches to the Linux kernel to bring its new generation of processors to life, especially the Snapdragon X Elite family (identified in many commits as X1E80100). These patches are not cosmetic: they enable everything from NVMe storage over PCIe to audio, as well as power, pins, buses, and the system cache itself.

Qualcomm's commitment to Linux means that many of these improvements are already part of the versions Linux 6.8 and Linux 6.9This demonstrates that the company is not just focused on marketing "compatible with Linux," but is pushing for real support in the main kernel tree, something essential for distributions to offer functional images without resorting to endless external patches.

At the same time, the situation is contradictory: while kernel support matures, some manufacturers like TUXEDO have decided to pause their Linux-oriented laptop projects with Snapdragon X1E due to firmware, BIOS, and other structural issues. In other words, the kernel is progressing, but the entire platform is still not up to the standards required by a "factory-ready" Linux hardware provider.

Key Qualcomm patches already integrated into the Linux kernel

Qualcomm has been sending a series of very specific patches for Snapdragon X Elite and other ARM64 platforms, without which the system would simply be unusable. Among the most relevant support blocks already integrated into Linux 6.8 and 6.9 are:

First, support for NVMe over PCIeThis is essential for high-performance SSDs connected to the PCI Express bus to function correctly in these systems. Without these platform-specific drivers, storage performance or even drive detection could be poor or nonexistent.

A set of drivers for the Sound system From the Snapdragon references, with support for the audio codec and the various input and output paths. This is key for something as basic as the speakers, microphone, and headphone jack working on laptops.

Another important piece is the support for the PMIC PMC8380The power management chip in some Qualcomm platforms is responsible for voltage regulation, battery charging, and other essential aspects of system power. Therefore, having a robust upstream driver is a necessary condition for laptops to be truly usable with Linux on a daily basis.

In addition, Qualcomm has worked on the subsystem of Pinctrl (TLMM)This manages the configuration of the SoC pins, as well as the Phy blocks designated for PCIe, eDP, and USB. These patches ensure that the various physical ports (USB, video outputs, PCI Express links) are correctly initialized and configured for use by the rest of the system controllers.

Finally, descriptors and support have been added for the CRD and QCP reference platesas well as for the system cache. These boards serve as a basis for both Qualcomm and manufacturers to test and validate Linux even before commercial laptops exist, and the main kernel's understanding of these boards is fundamental for the early maturation of support.

Features coming to future kernels: battery, GPU, cameras, and more

Beyond what's already included in Linux 6.8 and 6.9, Qualcomm has a New wave of patches planned for kernels 6.10 and 6.11These changes aim to fill particularly sensitive gaps in a modern desktop or laptop environment.

Among the areas being worked on, the full support of battery and power managementIt is not enough for the system to detect a battery; it is essential that the indicators are accurate, that charging and discharging are optimized, and that reliable low-power, sleep, and resume states are enabled.

Another important front is the support of USB hostThis applies to both traditional USB ports and high-speed variants, including USB4, where many users and manufacturers have still detected limitations in effective speed and stability in devices with Snapdragon X1E.

In the graphics field, Qualcomm is boosting support for its GPU Adreno Integrated graphics, including both 3D rendering and external video output via DisplayPort (DP). The Snapdragon X Elite's GPU is capable of reaching 4.6 TFLOPS, so good Linux support opens the door to gaming, 3D applications, and high-level graphics acceleration workloads.

But it doesn't stop there: there's also work in areas like advanced video, camera and audio (speakers, microphones, headphones, and combinations thereof). This includes the use of hardware multimedia encoding and decoding engines, which is key to saving battery power and reducing CPU load when playing or editing high-resolution videos.

Finally, there is a strong focus on suspension and resumptionOn ARM laptops, poor sleep mode behavior can ruin the experience, causing runaway power consumption or system failures when waking up. The patches Qualcomm is releasing aim to make the sleep/resume cycle as reliable as on a well-supported x86 laptop.

Snapdragon X Elite: Raw power and AI capabilities

The heart of these efforts is the Snapdragon X EliteThis ARM CPU is designed to directly challenge high-end processors from AMD, Intel, and, in the ARM environment, Apple Silicon. This chip features 12 cores capable of reaching frequencies of up to 4,3 GHz, a figure that clearly places it in the league of high-performance desktop and laptop processors.

The Snapdragon X Elite design is a SoC (System on Chip) that integrates a Adreno GPU with up to 4.6 TFLOPS of powerThis makes it a perfectly viable option for both gaming and GPU-intensive tasks such as rendering, visual effects, or complex 3D engines, provided the driver stack on Linux is up to the task.

One particularly relevant point is the ability to AI integrated into the chipQualcomm announces up to 45 TOPS (tera operations per second) dedicated to artificial intelligence workloads. In the context of Linux, this can be leveraged in optimized inference frameworks, speech recognition applications, computer vision, or any task that makes intensive use of machine learning models.

All of this adds up to a strong emphasis on the Energy Efficiency A SoC with this level of power density and features must maintain low power consumption to be attractive in ultrathin laptops and always-connected devices. Power patches and optimizations in Linux will be key to ensuring a comparable experience to Windows or macOS in terms of battery life and sustained performance.

These capabilities place the Snapdragon X Elite in a very competitive position within the PC market. The big challenge is ensuring all of this that potential reaches Linux users smoothly, without the need for hacks, firmware extraction from Windows, or juggling custom kernels.

Roadmap: Open firmware, browsers, and distributions

Qualcomm has shared a rough roadmap of six months of work Specifically aimed at improving the Linux experience, one of the central pillars of this plan is end-to-end video decoding in browsers like Firefox and Chrome, leveraging the SoC's video engines instead of relying solely on the CPU.

In addition, it is contemplated CPU and GPU optimizations Linux-specific improvements ensure that both the kernel scheduler and user-space libraries fully utilize Qualcomm's ARM hardware. These enhancements should result in faster response times, reduced power consumption, and smarter use of the Adreno GPU to accelerate interfaces and applications.

Another key aspect of the roadmap is the objective of Publish the firmware openly through the linux-firmware repositoryHaving the firmware available in that standard location allows distributions to package everything necessary without forcing the user to extract it from a Windows installation or download it from opaque sources.

Qualcomm has also mentioned its intention to offer Easy installers for Ubuntu and DebianThis involves system images and installation processes specifically designed for your ARM platforms, with all the necessary kernel patches, modules, and firmware to ensure the system boots and runs smoothly.

To encourage collaboration, the company has published a experimental disk image for a Debian installer and encourages the community to follow the updates and patches on the LKML (Linux Kernel Mailing List) by searching for the string “X1E80100”. With this approach, they aim to receive early feedback on what is missing, what is failing, and what should be prioritized in subsequent development cycles.

The other side of the coin: closed firmware and community frustration

Despite these positive developments, a significant portion of the Linux community that has tried Snapdragon X1E in practice It shows considerable frustration. A very clear source of conflict is the actual availability of the necessary firmware so that all hardware components function correctly in Linux.

Many users wonder why there isn't one official, clear and redistributable channel to install the firmware needed by critical components of X1E systems. Currently, in too many cases, the only option is to "boot" a Windows installation, extract the firmware blobs from it, and manually transfer them to Linux, with all the legal and practical problems that this entails.

To make matters worse, in several cases the Firmware redistribution is not permitted through standard channels such as the linux-firmware repository itself. This creates a fragile ecosystem, where each user has to fend for themselves, and where Linux distributors cannot simply package everything necessary and provide official support for the platform.

This situation is perceived as a structural problem rather than a simple technical hiccup. redistributable firmware, fully upstream drivers, and a stable hardware baseIt is very difficult to get Linux-oriented laptop manufacturers to launch commercial products with Snapdragon X1E and offer several years of updates.

As a result, advanced users and developers have asked Qualcomm very direct questions: what is actually blocking this Linux-friendly firmware distribution model, if anything? public plan to make these systems sustainable in the long term and what would have to change to be able to abandon dependence on workflows based on Windows installations.

The TUXEDO case: project paused due to lack of maturity

One of the most visible reality checks has been the decision to TUXEDO ComputersA well-known manufacturer of laptops with Linux pre-installed, has paused or even discontinued its initiative to launch a notebook with Snapdragon X1E as its flagship platform for Linux.

On November 21, 2025, TUXEDO published a statement explaining that the the platform proved less suitable for Linux than they had expectedAlthough they managed to create functional prototypes that some people were able to see in person, the accumulated problems made it impossible to continue as things stood.

Among the reasons cited by TUXEDO were the absence of a viable BIOS update methodThe lack of proper fan control, unpredictable behavior in KVM virtualization, and the inability to achieve high and stable speeds on USB4 are all elements that, for a Linux laptop provider, are critical in terms of user experience and subsequent technical support.

They also mentioned that, although it was possible, hardware video decodingHowever, support in real-world applications was poor, which reduced the practical value of that functionality for end users. It's not enough for the hardware to be able to do it; browsers, media players, and other software also need to use it reliably.

Even so, TUXEDO left the door open to Re-evaluate future generations of Snapdragon and contribute upstream with some of the work they did, for example, on the specific Device Trees for their prototypes. The message is clear: there is interest, but the platform lacks maturity for serious out-of-the-box Linux support.

The Linux 6.3 kernel leap: ARM cleanup, drivers, and security

While all this is happening on the Qualcomm front, the The Linux kernel continues to evolve at a very good pace. One example is Linux 6.3, released by Linus Torvalds after two months of work, which incorporated 15.637 changes submitted by 2.055 developers, with a 76 MB patch that affected almost 14.300 files and added more than a million lines of code.

Statistically speaking, around 39% of the changes in Linux 6.3 focused on drivers15% in architecture-specific code, 10% in the network stack, 5% in file systems, and 3% in internal kernel subsystems. These figures reflect the weight that drivers and support for new platforms (including many ARM and ARM64) have on current kernel development.

Among the most notable new features is the major cleanup of old and obsolete ARM platformsMore than 40 platforms were removed from the code tree, resulting in a reduction of approximately 150.000 lines. This pruning helps keep the kernel manageable and reduces the maintenance burden on hardware that is no longer practically relevant.

Linux 6.3 also took significant steps in the Rust language integration within the kernel. Although support is not yet enabled by default and does not make Rust a mandatory dependency, types such as Arc, ScopeGuard, and ForeignOwnable have been added, and the "borrow" module has been removed from the alloc package. This integration is now considered close to the point where the kernel will natively accept the first modules written in Rust.

Another interesting feature introduced is hwnoiseA tool for tracking hardware-caused delays was added, measuring jitter during operation execution even with interrupts disabled. Alongside this, a kernel module with a reference implementation of the Dhrystone benchmark was also included, useful for evaluating the performance of new CPUs and SoCs during the early stages of portability.

Memory services, BPF optimizations, and support for new architectures

Within the area of ​​memory and system services, Linux 6.3 introduced the option to Disable memory accounting for BPF programs using the command-line parameter "cgroup.memory=nobpf". This can be useful on systems heavily laden with containers, where the overhead of BPF accounting incurs an unnecessary cost.

A was also added for GPF implementation of red-black tree structures Using kfunc + kptr (bpf_rbtree_add, bpf_rbtree_remove, bpf_rbtree_first) avoids the need to introduce a new, specific map type. This lays the foundation for more complex and efficient BPF programs in network and observability scenarios.

In the mechanism of Resettable sequences (rseq) The ability to pass concurrency identifiers associated with the CPU number was incorporated, an important tool for performing atomic operations quickly and reliably in multithreaded environments, restarting the operation when it is interrupted by another thread.

At the architecture level, support was added for instructions SME 2 (Scalable Matrix Extension) In ARM processors, the “BPF trampoline” was implemented in s390x and RISC-V RV64 to minimize call overhead between kernel and BPF, and the use of ZBB instructions was enabled in RISC-V to speed up string operations.

The relatively new architecture LoongArch Linux also benefited from Linux 6.3, which added support for KASLR, kernel relocation, hardware breakpoints, and kprobe mechanisms. Furthermore, the minimal Nolibc library expanded its coverage to include s390 and Arm Thumb1, joining ARM, AArch64, i386, x86_64, RISC-V, and MIPS.

Improvements to file systems, I/O, and storage

In the area of ​​storage, Linux 6.3 incorporated notable improvements in Btrfs, ext4, f2fs, EROFS and in the BFQ I/O schedulerThese modifications have a direct impact on the performance and reliability of both desktop and server systems.

In Btrfs, to reduce fragmentation, the following approach was chosen: divide the extensions by size when allocating blocks: small (up to 128 KB), medium (up to 8 MB), and large. The RAID56 implementation was also refactored, the checksum verification code was redesigned, and send operations were accelerated up to 10 times through utime caching for directories and deferred command execution.

Ext4 improved its performance by allowing multiple processes perform direct I/O on pre-allocated blocks using shared inode locks, instead of exclusive locks that blocked parallelism. f2fs addressed serious atomic write problems and the new extension cache, while also improving code readability.

EROFS, designed for read-only partitions, added the ability to link the decompression of compressed files to the CPU to reduce latency when accessing data. In parallel, the BFQ scheduler introduced support for advanced spinning disk drives with multiple separately controlled actuators (Multi Actuator).

In the area of ​​networking, support was added for AES-SHA2 encryption in NFSOn both the client and server, the FUSE subsystem introduced the query extension that allows attaching additional information (such as groups) to requests, which is useful for correctly applying permissions when creating objects in FUSE-based file systems.

Virtualization, security and networking: BIG TCP, Spectre and Hyper-V

Linux 6.3 came loaded with improvements in virtualization and securityIn the KVM hypervisor for x86, support was added for extended Hyper-V hypercalls and forwarding these to controllers on the user-space host, making it possible to run Hyper-V in a nested manner.

The restriction of Guest access to PMU eventsThis prevents virtual machines from reading performance counters that could leak sensitive information. In parallel, the memfd mechanism gained the ability to irrevocably create non-executable memory areas (non-executable memfd), reinforcing hardening techniques.

The operation was introduced PR_SET_MDWE In prctl, which blocks attempts to assign memory permissions that allow simultaneous write and execute, strengthening defenses against exploits. Additionally, a new protection against Spectre-type attacks was enabled by default, based on the AMD Zen 4's IBRS automatic mode, which adjusts instruction speculation during interrupts, syscalls, and context switches with less overhead than Retpoline.

One was also corrected vulnerability related to Spectre v2 In the presence of SMT/Hyper-Threading, caused by the deactivation of the STIBP mechanism when using IBRS. Regarding architectures, ARM64 received a new "virtconfig" build target that activates only the components necessary to boot in virtualization environments, and m68k gained syscall filtering with seccomp.

In the network stack, one was added Netlink interface for PLC configuration (IEEE 802.3cg-2019), the netlink API was documented in more detail, and the ynl-gen-c tool was implemented to generate C code from YAML specifications. The IP_LOCAL_PORT_RANGE option was also added to sockets to facilitate shared NAT configurations without resorting to complex SNAT.

Hardware drivers: Older GPUs out, enhanced Qualcomm Adreno support

The device subsystem in Linux 6.3 saw a massive cleanup of old graphics drivers and the introduction of new controllers for modern platforms, including several based on Qualcomm and ARM64.

All DRI1-based drivers (i810, mga, r128, savage, sis, tdfx, and via), considered obsolete since 2016 and unsupported by Mesa since 2012, were removed. Old fbdev drivers such as omap1, s3c2410, tmiofb, and w100fb were also retired, thus reducing the maintenance burden of code no longer used on current hardware.

Among the new additions, one stands out: DRM controller for the Intel Meteor Lake VPUintegrated into the "accel" subsystem for compute accelerators. The i915 controller expanded support for Intel Arc discrete GPUs, added preliminary support for Meteor Lake GPUs, and support for Intel Xe HP 4tile.

On the AMD side, the amdgpu driver introduced support for AdaptiveSync, Secure Display with multiple displays, and improvements to DCN 3.2, SR-IOV RAS, VCN RAS, SMU 13.x, and DP 2.1. Meanwhile, the Nouveau driver removed legacy ioctl calls, and the etnaviv driver added experimental support for the VeriSilicon NPU.

The pata_parport driver for IDE drives over parallel port made it possible remove the old PARIDE subsystem of the kernel, with the limitation of not being able to simultaneously connect a printer and a disk through the same port. In the wireless arena, ath12k was added, which provides support for Wi-Fi 7 cards based on Qualcomm chips, and support for devices with the Realtek RTL8188EU chipset.

New ARM64 platforms and Linux-libre 6.3-gnu kernel

Linux 6.3 also added support for 46 new ARM64 motherboards, including devices as varied as Samsung Galaxy Tab A (2015), Galaxy S5, BananaPi R3, Debix Model A, various EmbedFire LubanCat boards, Facebook Greatlakes, Orange Pi R1 Plus, the Tesla FSD platform and numerous devices based on Rockchip SoCs (RK3128, RK3588, RK3568, RK3566, RK3328) or TI K3.

This list includes new references based on Qualcomm SoCs, such as MSM8953 (Snapdragon 610), SM8550 (Snapdragon 8 Gen 2), SDM450 and SDM632Its inclusion in the main kernel tree highlights the constant attention that Qualcomm platforms receive within the Linux ARM64 ecosystem.

In parallel, the Latin American Free Software Foundation published linux-libre 6.3-gnuThis is a completely free variant of kernel 6.3, without firmware blobs or sections of non-free code tied to manufacturer restrictions. In this version, blobs were purged from new drivers such as ath12k, aw88395, and peb2466, as well as from the Device Tree files for AArch64-based qcom devices.

The blob cleanup code was updated in drivers and subsystems such as amdgpu, xhci-rcar, qcom-q6v5-pas, sp8870, and av7110, as well as in drivers for DVB cards with software decoding and in precompiled BPF. Manual purging of drivers such as mga, r128, tm6000, cpia2, and r8188eu was discontinued after their removal from the main kernel, and the cleaning blobs on the i915 controller.

All this context shows that, while Qualcomm and other manufacturers are pushing to better integrate their SoCs into Linux, a part of the community continues to opt for 100% free kernels and no proprietary firmwareThis adds another layer of complexity to the debate about support, performance, and user freedom.

With all these movements, the overall picture is that of a ecosystem in full swingQualcomm is accelerating the release of patches for RAS support and critical features on its ARM platforms; the Linux kernel is introducing profound changes to drivers, security, and architectures; and at the same time, the community and hardware manufacturers are pushing for a truly sustainable firmware and BIOS model for Linux, without relying on Windows or half-baked solutions. The key in the coming years will be to see if these efforts converge enough for laptops and desktops with Snapdragon and other ARM SoCs to compete head-to-head with x86 in the open-source software arena as well.