Device Tree patches have been posted for enabling Linux support on the Lenovo Thinkbook 16 G7 QOY powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Plus SoC.
The Lenovo Thinkbook 16 G7 QOY is the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 series laptop on the road to seeing upstream Linux kernel support thanks to these patches. The Thinkbook 16 G7 QOY features an 8-core Snapdragon X Plus SoC with Qualcomm Adreno graphics, 1920 x 1200 60Hz IPS 16-inch display, and 32GB of LPDDR5x memory. Currently this ARM-powered Lenovo ThinkBook retails for around $1400 USD.
Like with other Snapdragon X Series laptops, Windows 11 ships by default but with the proper Device Tree (DT) and some adjustments, Linux can be made to work. With the current DT, the Linux support/expectations on the ThinkBook 16 come down to:
“Supported features:
– USB type-c and type-a ports
– Keyboard
– Touchpad (all that are described in the dsdt)
– Touchscreen (described in the dsdt, no known SKUss)
– Display including PWM backlight control
– PCIe devices
– nvme
– SDHC card reader
– ath12k WCN7850 Wifi and Bluetooth
– ADSP and CDSP
– GPIO keys (Lid switch)
– Sound via internal speakers / DMIC / USB / headphone jack
– DP Altmode with 2 lanes (as all of these still do)
– Integrated fingerprint reader (FPC)
– Integrated UVC cameraNot supported yet:
– HDMI port.
– EC and some fn hotkeys.Limited support yet:
– SDHC card reader is based on the on-chip sdhc_2 controller, but the driver from
the Snapdragon Dev Kit is only a partial match. It can do normal slow sd cards,
but not the faster ones.– The Purwa SoC has 8 compute cores and a different GPU (X1-45, apparently A730).
The GPU is not yet supported. Graphics is only software rendered. The SoC has 2 instead of 3 thermal sensor banks. I have disabled all sensors on the 3rd bank to get rid of dmesg errors. Many of these sensor nodes have a place on the remaining 2 banks, but I don’t know which. So the thermal management is clearly incomplete, but the firmware monitoring the chip does a power off before overheating (not experienced yet). For the Thinkbook, it has a pretty decent fan that can develop some air flow, so maybe this has prevented the emergency cutoff. As a result of these unknowns, I had to modify x1e80100.dtsi and x1p42100.dtsi to delete the non-existend nodes.”
The lack of working GPU acceleration as well as incomplete thermal/power management will be a blocker for many from potentially using this laptop under Linux on a daily basis. The lack of HDMI port will also prevent those students or office workers typically relying on HDMI or even just for an external display to be another blocker as well. More background on these Linux woes with the Snapdragon X1 series can be found in my recent article Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux vs. AMD vs. Intel along with benchmarks of the X Elite SoC as the higher-end part over the X Plus.
The DT patches under review for this laptop can be found on the Linux kernel mailing list thanks to this work carried out by Jens Glathe.
