Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 Sees Timely Support With The Mainline Linux 5.17 Kernel

Qualcomm only announced the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and X65 platforms at the end of November but already they have managed to provide timely mainline support for these latest high-end SoCs. This is great to see compared to the days of slow to materialize mainline support for new Arm SoCs, which still persists among some vendors with either belated mainline support or only focusing on vendor downstream kernels. The big batch of Arm SoC/platform changes have landed for Linux 5.17.

The big set of Arm platform/SoC changes is all ready for mainline Linux 5.17. New SoCs now supported by the mainline Linux 5.17 kernel include the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, Snapdragon SDX65, NXP i.MX8ULP, Texas Instruments J721S2, and Renesas R-Car S4-8. Seeing prompt support for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is exciting for that recently-announced SoC manufactured on a 4nm process and over the Snapdragon 888 advertises 20% better CPU performance and 30% more power efficient. Besides the SoCs itself, the reference boards for the new Qualcomm SoCs are also supported with Linux 5.17.

The Snapdragon X65 (SDX65) is their recently-announced, latest-generation 5G Modem-RF system. The Snapdragon X65 is able to run a minimal Linux environment on the X65's Cortex-A7 core.

Linux 5.17 also adds support for the Mediatek MT7986a/b SoC that is used in some WiFi drivers but for this initial mainlining the support is quite basic.

On the Apple M1 front, this set of changes include support for the PMGR power management driver. This new apple-pmgr-pwrstate driver is for high-level power state controls for the Apple M1 SoC hardware. This includes reset support and generic power domain framework integration. Various DeviceTree updates are also in place for Apple's M1 MacBook and iMac.

On the DeviceTree side, there is ASpeed AST2500/AST2600 BMCs in various Tyan, Facebook, and Yadro servers added. There is also 20 new NXP development boards added, support for the NetGear RAXE500 WiFi router using the BCM4908 SoC, and support for a new NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin developer kit. Linux 5.17 can also now boot on older Android devices relying on 32-bit Tegra support out of the box, such as some of the old ASUS Transformer tablets.

See the pulls for the full list of Arm hardware patches this cycle in kicking off 2022 kernel development.