During the second day keynote, one of the topics that came up during talks about the Snapdragon X2 Series and the new X2 Plus was support for Linux on the platform. Qualcomm says it hears the request of developers and will be providing support for both Ubuntu and Debian.

Qualcomm says that it will bring support for both Linux platforms by this year, but that it has been working on providing support through Early Developer Preview.

“Linux support for laptops with Snapdragon X2 Series is rolling out in stages, starting with the core pieces developers need before they can do production-level work on their device. The first priority is upstreaming the drivers that unlock real workloads, including Qualcomm Hexagon NPU support through fastRPC for on-device AI inference and GPU support through Freedreno, Turnip and Rusticl, the open-source Mesa drivers for Qualcomm Adreno graphics and compute.”

This is a little technical, but thanks to the chipmaker’s blog, here’s the gist of what it intends to provide, support-wise:

• Boot and system bring-up – Qualcomm Linux supports systemd-boot as the Universal extensible firmware interface (UEFI) boot manager to load and boot the Linux kernel.
• Core I/O – Developers can boot & connect Low and high-speed I/O peripherals, including USB/ PCIE/ Qualcomm universal peripheral (UP) serial engine (supporting UART/I2C/SPI) to respective endpoints.
• Graphics and display – Freedreno, Turnip and Rusticl work that helps enable desktop UI, browser acceleration, graphics workloads, and GPU compute over time.
• AI acceleration – FastRPC driver upstreaming that enables access to Hexagon NPU for local inference workloads.
• Power, thermal, and reliability – Support system-wide power management across subsystems, and enable overall system-wide stability.

If you want to read more about the feature in detail, you can head over to the official developer’s blog. We’ve provided the link in the source. Ultimately, it would be interesting to see just how well Linux performs on the Snapdragon X2 Series platform, and how it goes up against its now rivals, Intel, AMD, and to a certain extent, NVIDIA.

On a related note, Qualcomm also announced that Asus would be one of the first brands that will bring Ubuntu to its Snapdragon X2 laptops by the first half of 2027.

(Source: Qualcomm)

Updated 2:16 pm, Fri, 25 September 26