Longtime Red Hat engineer Hans de Goede who worked on many Intel/AMD laptop enhancements over the years left Red Hat and ended up joining Qualcomm. Now it turns out one of his projects at Qualcomm is enhancing the Fedora Linux support for running nicely out-of-the-box on Snapdragon-powered Windows on ARM laptops.
Hans de Goede filed a change proposal for providing automatic DTB selection on AArch64 EFI systems. The change proposal still needs to be voted on by FESCo but given it’s rather straight-forward, it will presumably fly without objections.
The change proposal summarizes it as delivering a nice out-of-the-box experience for Fedora Live images on Windows on ARM laptops:
“Make the aarch64 Fedora Live ISO images work OOTB on Windows on ARM (WoA) laptops by automatically selecting the right DTB at boot.
…
This change will use a modified kernel image which embeds the Stubble boot stub, hardware-id to DTB mappings and relevant DTB files. The Stubble stub will use the embedded mappings to find the right DTB file and automatically load that DTB file. Whereas before users would need to modify the ISO image to manually add the right DTB file, otherwise the image would not work.The modified kernel image is in essence an incomplete UKI containing just a UKI boot-stub and the DTBs, but not an initrd nor a kernel commandline. The host generated initrd and host specific commandline will still be supplied by GRUB as usual, including allowing the user to make changes to the commandline through GRUB.
The embedded stub and DTBs cause the vmlinuz size to increase by approx. 3MB from ~16MB to ~19MB.”
Here’s to hoping this effort pans out nicely and will lead to a better Fedora Linux experience on Snapdragon X series laptops now that Hans de Goede is at Qualcomm. So far for Linux on Snapdragon X Elite laptops the best experience has arguably been with Ubuntu’s X1E Concept images but even there the experience can be bumpy and the performance not all that great relative to AMD Ryzen and Intel Core Ultra on Linux.
