Qualcomm Talks Up Linux On Snapdragon X2 Laptops

Qualcomm at their Snapdragon Summit taking place in Hawaii are talking up the forthcoming Linux support for Snapdragon X2 series laptops. In recent months I've noted an uptick in Qualcomm engineers working on upstreaming various elements of Snapdragon X2 Elite Linux support to working on Device Tree support for different X2-powered laptops and more. It's been refreshing seeing all of the Linux/open-source activity around the Snapdragon X2 from Qualcomm and a notable uptick over the X1 series. A lot of the work is still landing and various kinks being worked out, but it's a definite improvement. Qualcomm solidified their X2 Linux actions today at the Snapdragon Summit by showcasing their Linux bring-up. They announced an early developer preview of the Snapdragon X2 for Linux. They are using a custom Linux kernel build paired with the Debian 13 user-space. A lot of the initial enablement is already upstream while more work is going on around the Hexagon NPU as well as the Adreno GPU support in Mesa with the Freedreno and Turnip drivers and even Rusticl support. More work is also due to take place around power, thermals, and reliability. In a separate Qualcomm blog post today they also talked up the Linux support coming for the Snapdragon X2 series. Enticing from that announcement is this statement: "Linux is a foundation the whole industry can build on — and this is just the beginning. Our partners HP, ASUS and HUMAIN are planning Linux support in the first of 2027, so that their devices deliver the incredible experience users expect with Snapdragon X2 Series in a new operating system." It will be great if the likes of HP and ASUS will be officially supporting Linux on Snapdragon X2 hardware in H1'2027. It will be exciting to continue monitoring this progress of Snapdragon X2 Linux support and ultimately how well the support and power/performance compares to the AMD Ryzen and Intel Core Ultra laptop competition on Linux. Hopefully we find our hands on review samples of the Snapdragon X2 series laptops for Linux testing and performance benchmarking at Phoronix. In the case of the original Snapdragon X laptop testing I bought the hardware for that initial Linux testing albeit with today's hardware pricing squeeze and difficult time in the web publishing / ad space, that's, unfortunately, not happening again.