“For many years developers have asked us for one thing, Linux on Snapdragon. We heard you,” says Kedar Kondap, SVP and general manager of compute and gaming at Qualcomm. Speaking at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit, Kondap says Linux support with Debian will be available “at the end of this year” for Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon X2 series of chips. Qualcomm is upstreaming core drivers, including for its Hexagon NPU and Adreno GPU. Ubuntu support is also coming in the first half of 2027.
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Are they actually upstreaming anything or just “debian and ubuntu support™” where its just two random images they supply like sbc manufacturers usually do?
The first priority is upstreaming the drivers that unlock real workloads, including Qualcomm Hexagon NPU support through fastRPC for on-device AI inference and GPU support through Freedreno , Turnip and Rusticl the open-source Mesa drivers for Qualcomm Adreno graphics and compute.
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Out-of-tree patches may help early bring-up, but mainline support is what distribution maintainers and long-term developers can build on across kernel releases.
Are they actually upstreaming anything or just “debian and ubuntu support™” where its just two random images they supply like sbc manufacturers usually do?
In their blog post, they elaborate: