Linux on (non-Apple) ARM, what is the current status?
Qualcomm Snapdragon, Ampere and maybe others. Support of Snapdragons was said to be quite bad due to the lack of upstream “giving a damn about Linux”.
Has this changed?
Well, my Raspberry Pi 5 works perfectly.
Huh, so does my Zero W 2.
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This isn’t exactly true. UEFI supports arm and if I’m not mistaken windows on arm is UEFI only. While UEFI isn’t as standard as it is in the PC world it is very common on servers and windows devices.
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Well, Asahi development was not random dart throwing. They used some VM that can be loaded in an early boot stage, which apple then removed on later devices, making m4 way harder to support.
On Android, a locked bootloader means you cannot change the core operating system. It has nothing to do with how documented or standards compliant the rest of the system is.
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There recently was a project that did UEFI on a phone.
Perhaps we can consider doing so with all ARM and RISC V stuff?
Or maybe come up with another common interface more suited to the platform?Considering Qualcomm went and 1TKO’d Arduino, I’d say we are better off not waiting for it to get onboard.
i typically imagine the mess of qualcomm drivers is part of the reason why its hard. regardless of the OS, be it windows, android and in this case, linux, driver support has generally been spotty for snapdragon products.
im curious on what the upstream stuff valve is pushing with its steam frame, as its of the few known companies actually paying for development for arm on linux. the device isnt out yet, but should be opened up within the quarter supposedly.
Qualcomm is merging a lot of drivers for snapdragon 2. Seems like theyre trying to improve on the failure that was snapdragon 1 on linux.
I’d like to know more about it too.
So far, from what I know, the main problem is the drivers for everything but CPU. Linux runs perfectly on ARM, be it Apple or not, but when it comes to something like a video adapter… with HW-accelerated video decoding and stuff… here’s where you start getting problems.
Regarding software, I run an ARM-based distro inside a VM on Apple for work and everything from what I need there exists and works.
pine64 has quite a few devices running different distros, but thats more like low end devices (thoigh they have a tablet, a laptop, phones etc.)
The Steam Frame will be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon arm CPU with Full SteamOS support, so I guess if Valve goes for it it’s good enough and will improve faster.
But I’ve never installed any Linux distro on an arm device myself.
It’s been continuously improving. There are devices that are a hassle but you’re a lot more likely to have things Just Working compared to a few years ago.
My understanding is that Ampere and others should run perfectly like any old x86 with a normal dist like vanilla Debian mostly due to a lot of hard work from individuals in the wider community.
Much of the time, dtb (device tree) and device drivers are what it comes down to.
For more estoric or finicky hardware, I think the dists with the best ARM support are Armbian, OpenWrt, and PostmarketOS.
Jeff Geerling has been reporting a lot about his experiments. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/
I wrote about getting Debian running on a device based on a popular Rockchip SoC last year. I assume the kernel situation has improved since trixie. https://blog.kumio.org/posts/2025/01/bananapim7-hvm.html
