Patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list are hoping to provide mainline support for the Acer Swift SFA14-11 laptop powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite X1E78100 SoC.
It’s the seemingly never-ending flow of new Device Tree “DT” patches for enabling more Qualcomm Snapdragon X series laptops to work with the mainline Linux kernel. While new Snapdragon X2 powered laptops are expected to be shown off this week at CES in Las Vegas, the Linux kernel is still seeing support worked out for different Snapdragon X1 laptops as well as filling gaps in feature support/compatibility for those laptops already with mainline kernel support but with features missing or performance still not up to scratch. At the end of December I provided a fresh look at the current Ubuntu Linux based support for the X1E within Snapdragon X Elite Laptop Performance On Linux Ends 2025 Disappointing.
It’s the Acer Swift 14 Snapdragon X1 Elite that I’ve been using for Linux testing nearly the past year. Independent contributor Weifu Wu is the one that over the weekend started working on proposing the DT patches for the SFA14-11 model with X1E78100 to the mainline kernel.
The patch series was posted partially on Sunday but mail server issues prevented all the patches from making it out. From the initial patches posted though there were already critiques over the proposed Device Tree. And based upon review, it appears the Device Tree patches were never actually tested before sending them to the Linux kernel mailing list.
Following the mail server issue yesterday, today the DT patch series was posted to the LKML this time successfully in full. But as the same patches as yesterday when the above-mentioned issues were already pointed out in the DT file, leading to some frustration expressed by veteran ARM Linux developer Krzysztof Kozlowski. The patches in turn were already NAK’ed (not acknowledged) as they were clearly not even tested.
So there is movement toward having mainline Linux kernel support for the Acer Swift SFA14-11 but not yet ready and causing some frustration on the mailing list. We’ll see if these patches can get cleaned up and tested in the near future for continuing to improve the mainline Linux state for the Snapdragon X1 Elite hardware.
