Comment by overfeed
3 months ago
My apologies to you and the entire Qualcomm marketing team for my brand-guideline violations - I was going off the top of my head. What I meant in my inscrutable comment was: "Elite X" => "X Elite", "Elite P" => "X Plus", I really should not have mangled the products using such an elegant and intuitive naming convention.
Ok, so having clarified the naming, it still looks like you're wrong about which chips are getting driver support upstreamed, because the Snapdragon X Plus parts are (with maybe one exception, IIRC) literally the same chip as the Snapdragon X Elite parts. Do you really believe that the upstream Linux kernel would accept patches that are specifically crafted to only work on certain bins of the chip, or to fail to enable a peripheral if not enough of the CPU cores are enabled?
Don't take my word for it - go to the Ubuntu Concept Snapdragon thread[1] and search for "plus" or "x1p".
> Do you really believe that the upstream Linux kernel would accept patches that are specifically crafted to only work on certain bins of the chip, or to fail to enable a peripheral if not enough of the CPU cores are enabled?
It takes more than a kernel patch to boot a laptop. Qualcomm has been neglecting to release the dtbs for Plus laptops. If you want good peripheral support, don't buy a "plus" variant. Getting back to your question, the answer is "Yes, Linux has always accepted patches that only work on some configurations" with no requirement to support all h/w configuration variants. Infact, some configurations are so obscure only the submitter can test - the maintainer/subsystem chief/Linus may not even know what the potential variants are.
1. https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-concept-snapdragon-x-e...
I don't think your link contains the evidence you think it does. I'm not seeing anything that looks like Qualcomm contributing device trees on behalf of system OEMs, for any of the Snapdragon X products, so I don't see how you can claim that they're being selective. It looks like the device trees are mostly being reverse-engineered by the community, adding new system support derived from device trees for systems that already have some support.
Do you have any clear instances of Qualcomm contributing something that's specific to Snapdragon X Elite parts and does not work for Snapdragon X Plus bins of the same silicon?
Or even for the more general issue: have you ever seen a Linux driver include arbitrary restrictions that make it refuse to work on identical hardware just because the marketing name for that bin of the same silicon was different?
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