While much of the emphasis for Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite laptop SoC has been around Windows on Arm PCs, Qualcomm has also been working to have upstream Linux support for this high-end SoC and everything is coming together for said support.

Qualcomm has been [1]upstreaming Snapdragon X Elite support for the mainline Linux kernel. The SoC support is coming together nicely while we'll see how the actual product / laptop platform support is playing out in the months ahead.

With Linux 6.8~6.9 they have upstreamed much of the functionality while for Linux 6.10~6.11 they are working still on camera, video, memory DCVS, GPU support, suspend and resume, USB host, CPU frequency scaling, battery, external display support, and more.

Further out they plan to work on more CPU/GPU performance optimizations, power optimizations, end-to-end hardware video decoding for the likes of Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, libcamera SoftISP camera support, making the firmware available in linux-firmware, and working on easy Linux distribution installer support.

For now they have an experimental raw disk image for a Debian installer that they have been using for their reference devices. Those wishing to learn more about the Linux support status for the Snapdragon X Elite can do so via the [2]Qualcomm Developer Blog . Hopefully we'll get our hands on Snapdragon X Elite hardware in due course for seeing how the support and Linux performance play out.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.8-ARM-Changes

[2] https://www.qualcomm.com/developer/blog/2024/05/upstreaming-linux-kernel-support-for-the-snapdragon-x-elite