It has been two years since the initial mainline Linux support for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 (SM8650) was posted on the very day of its marketing announcement and used to present the Qualcomm platforms mainline state in this very conference on an SM8650 HDK development board. What started as basic boot support with display has evolved into a fully-featured upstream ecosystem, but the road was far from smooth.
In this session, we will explore the technical evolution of SM8650 support, moving beyond the "it boots" milestone to a fully usable system. We will dissect the challenges of enabling complex subsystems—from the Hexagon DSPs and Adreno 750 GPU to the intricate power domains that modern SoCs demand to properly support runtime power management and suspend-to-ram state.
We will also address the often-overlooked bootloader story, showcasing the current state of upstream U-Boot on this platform and how it interacts with the standard EFI boot flow.
The Talk Will Feature a Technical Post-Mortem about the whole upstreaming process and a live demonstration running mainline Linux on actual Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 powered device running the mainline kernel with code changes—proving that upstream support is no longer just for development boards.