Qualcomm recently announced the Snapdragon X2 Elite and Elite Extreme, which appear to be putting up some respectable CPU and GPU benchmarks, but there hasn't been much word on Linux compatibility until now. A recent Linux driver patch sees the start of adding open source driver support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 series GPUs in the X2 Elite SoC to the open-source Qualcomm MSM Direct Rendering Management driver. The patch submission specifically calls out changes to the driver that were necessary because of the new slice-based architecture, as well as changes that allow for higher current draw and necessary thermal mitigations.

The development team also mentioned that Mesa and Vulkan support for the Adreno 840 and other 800 series Arm GPUs is currently work-in-progress and "will be posted in the near future". For reference, when it comes to the previous Snapdragon X Elite launch, there were significant driver updates as recently as July 2025, so even if the Qualcomm team is working on Linux driver support, it might be a while before Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme laptops are actually at feature-parity with x86 systems on Linux.Read the full patch submission below:

This series adds the A8xx HWL along with Adreno 840 GPU support to the drm-msm driver. A8x is the next generation in the Adreno family, featuring a significant hardware design change. A major update to the design is the introduction of 'Slice' architecture. Slices are sort of mini-GPUs within the GPU which are more independent in processing Graphics and compute workloads. Also, in addition to the BV and BR pipe we saw in A7x, CP has more concurrency with additional pipes.

From KMD-HW SWI perspective, there is significant register shuffling in some of the blocks. For slice or aperture related registers which are virtualized now, KMD/crashdumper has to configure an aperture register to access them. On the GMU front, there are some shuffling in register offsets, but it is manageable as of now. There is a new HFI message to transfer data tables and new power related features to support higher peak currents and thermal mitigations.

Adreno 840 GPU is the second generation architecture in the A8x family present in Kaanapali (a.k.a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5) chipset. It has a maximum of 3 slices with 2 SPs per slice. Along with the 3-slice configuration, there is also another 2-slice SKU (Partial Slice SKU). A840 GPU has a bigger 18 MB of GMEM which can be utilized for graphics and compute workload. It also features improved Concurrent binning support, UBWC v6 etc.

This series adds only the driver side support along with a few dt bindings updates. Devicetree patches will be sent separately, but those who are interested can take look at it from the Qualcomm's public tree. Features like coredump, gmu power features, ifpc, preemption etc will be added in a future series.

Initial few patches are for improving code sharing between a6xx/a7xx and a8x routines. Then there is a patch to rebase GMU register offsets from GPU's base. Rest of the patches add A8x HWL and Adreno 840 GPU support. Mesa support for A8x/A840 GPU is WIP and will be posted in the near
future.