Qualcomm warms bed for Linux on Arm PCs

Qualcomm may be leading the push for Windows on Arm systems, but the corporation also has an eye on Linux support with a roadmap for updates to enable the OS to boot on its Arm-based PC hardware. The San Diego chips and telecoms biz launched its Snapdragon X Elite system-on-chip (SoC) last October aimed at tablets and Windows …

[Doctor Syntax]

Hasn't anyone done this already?

[Johannesburgel12]

As mentioned in the article, they have been doing this for several older generations. Mainly through Linaro. But there is quite some room for improvements, and I'm happy their roadmap seems to be addressing most of it.

[Joe Burmeister]

Acorn!

They had the first ARM laptop : https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/22807/Acorn-A4-Laptop/

[Bebu]

"One eye on Windows, the other winking at penguins"

I am not certain I am getting the right picture here, but its a lewed Fagan making an obscene proposition to a penguin and involving a window. :)

A fairly open RISC platform with price/performance specs comparable with x86_64 systems is always welcome.

[Don Jon]

I cannnnt wait any longer.

@AMD, Zen5 machine hurry up too.

[captain veg]

"Qualcomm [...] has an eye on Linux support with a roadmap for updates to enable the OS to boot on its Arm-based PC hardware."

The IBM PC was important because, well, it was IBM, but the PC-compatible world in which we live was created by reverse-engineering the BIOS (by Compaq, among others) so allowing PC-DOS, in its guise as MS-DOS, a free pass to booting off generic hardware.

I'm not qualified to comment on the suitability of UEFI in this role. I wonder, though, whether the Raspberry PI bootloader might not serve as a better model. Keep it simple.

-A.

[druck]

The Raspberry Pi is a different kettle of fish to the Qualcomm SOCs, as its actually the GPU which loads a kernel image for the CPU to run.

[amacater]

Raspberry Pi bootloader?

No - just no. UEFI and ACPI is *definitely* the way to go if you can - it gives you the identical install experience on ARM and amd64. Pi 4 already has this possible and is so much nicer than using Raspberry Pi bootloader. edk2 / Tianocore is a good foundation that's readily understandable.

All this IMHO, YMMV etc.