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?
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.
if i am not wrong, boot process on non x86-64 is not standardised (no obivous uefi independent of os or setup). this genuinely limits the distros one can find, and mostly first party support is all you get. when first party does linux (raspberry pi or other sbcs), it is fine, and often their boot can be “used” by other third party distros (assuming license allows that). if first party does not, there is no way to get work done. something like android - if you get first party unlockable boot lock, you can hope for custom roms, without that, its playing darts where board is invisible. with apple mac, enough people had dart boards that random trial (and recovery processes) allowed them to get in. with qualcomm stuff, there is some first party support (and some second party support from nvidia who use qualcomm cpu for their servers) but qualcomm graphics is still a issue (first party support is very slow) and not enough third party interest (not enough people have qualcomm laptops for dartboards)
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.
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.
Well, my Raspberry Pi 5 works perfectly.
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.)
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.
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.
