Rob Clark, who originally started working on the reverse-engineering [1]Freedreno and MSM DRM graphics driver projects prior to even being employed by Qualcomm, presented this week at XDC 2026 Toronto around all the recent efforts they have been pursuing at Qualcomm for this upstream open-source graphics driver stack.

Rob Clark presented at the X.Org Developer's Conference around the many platforms they have recently upstreamed to the Linux kernel and their Mesa graphics driver code both for the Freedreno Gallium3D driver and Turnip Vulkan driver.

This hardware enablement effort has included work around the new Snapdragon X2 series hardware -- with Qualcomm [2]hoping to see a lot for Linux on Snapdragon X2 laptops in 2027. Plus there is other ongoing enablement work around their Hawi and Maili SoCs as well as other recent Snapdragon SoCs.

With the MSM DRM kernel driver there has also been a number of display improvements recently. With the GPU side they talked up the Adreno 800 series support being in good shape, the Rusticl OpenCL driver being enabled by default with OpenCL 3.1 support, and other improvements.

Some of the future plans include more work around GPU firmware scheduling, OpenCL Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support, and enabling [3]the new MALU matrix core found with the new Adreno 850 for compute workloads.

Those wishing to learn more about the recent and ongoing Qualcomm open-source graphics/display driver work can see [4]the PDF slides as well as the XDC2026 session recording embedded above.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Freedreno

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qualcomm-Talks-Up-X2-Linux

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qualcomm-Adreno-850-Open-Source

[4] https://indico.freedesktop.org/event/12/contributions/570/attachments/373/534/XDC2026%20Qualcomm%20Update.pdf