Snapdragon X Elite Fedora 42 System Bring-Up (and looking for collaborators or SIGs)!

[gurnben (Gurney Buchanan)]

Hey folks!

Background and Motivation
Emboldened by the recent progress that the Ubuntu folks have made in bringing up Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite-based systems, I picked up a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x to begin the process of bringing up Fedora on Snapdragon X (ARM) systems!

This is my first time contributing at this level to the project, so I’m fairly “green” but I have a lot of support from friends and colleagues!

First Roadblock: Missing Device Trees in Release ISOs
I’ve hit my first road block - the F42 and Rawhide latest aarch64 ISOs are missing the Device Trees (dtb-s) for the Snapdragon X Elite laptops, but they are present in the Kernel!

Planned Workaround
I’m planning on working around this problem by grabbing the kernel-core aarch64.rpm at the same version as is present in the 42 GA ISO and extracting the dtbs via rpm2cpio <rpm> | cpio -idv (advice from a friend for whom this is not his first system bring-up).

From there I’m planning on using lorax mkksiso — Lorax 41.3 documentation to build a modified ISO to see if I can get past this missing dtb / generating empty dtb error.

Request for Help
If these dtbs are present in the kernel-core RPM, could we update the release package / ISO build process to include them in at least Rawhide to better enable iteration on the Snapdragon X bring-up? I’m told that @adamwill / @ngompa (Hi Neal, we met at devconf US!) might have suggestions or guidance!

Looking for Others
Is there an existing group that is trying to bring up Snapdragon X laptops on Fedora? If so - where?? If not - wanna make one??

Thanks folks!
Gurney B.

[gurnben (Gurney Buchanan)]

Status Update

I have successfully built a Rawhide image non-ISO image and written it to USB. Unfortunately, the boot is failing on an error that may be related to issues with the actual build. I’m checking in with the folks over in #arm:fedoraproject.org. Which…

First Update: Finding Community
There are a few folks (at least) over in #arm:fedoraproject.org that have given Fedora a try (successfully) on the Snapdragon X Elite laptops. There is also a community that I haven’t engaged with yet over in IRC, visible via the bridge at #oftc#aarch64-laptops:matrix.org.

Second Update: How to Construct an Image / USB that contains the DTB and Grub Config
I was able to build an image that actually had the correct reference to the Device Tree!

First - the latest rawhide build contains all of the dtbs! Now we just have to make it reference the correct one!

Here’s how:

1. You need to start with a raw image for Fedora. You can find them on Index of /compose/rawhide. I started with the latest Rawhide build. here is a direct link to the image I used at time of writing: https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/compose/rawhide/latest-Fedora-Rawhide/compose/Workstation/aarch64/images/Fedora-Workstation-Disk-Rawhide-20250518.n.0.aarch64.raw.xz. The datetime will likely be different in the future and you’ll want to get the latest from Index of /compose/rawhide/latest-Fedora-Rawhide/compose/Workstation/aarch64/images
2. Run xz <image.raw.xz filename>
3. sudo kpartx -av <image.raw> (the output image from the previous command)

4.      sudo mount /dev/mapper/loop0p3 /mnt/
        sudo mount /dev/mapper/loop0p2 /mnt/root/boot
        sudo mount /dev/mapper/loop0p1 /mnt/root/boot/efi
   

5. Edit /mnt/root/boot/loader/entries/*conf to have: devicetree /boot/dtb/qcom/x1e80100-lenovo-yoga-slim7x.dtb (or you can reference the dtb for whatever laptop you have provided its in the directory - if you want to see what’s available, list them in /mnt/root/boot/dtb/

6.     sudo umount /mnt/root/boot/efi
    sudo umount /mnt/root/boot
    sudo umount /mnt/
    sudo kpartx -d <image.raw>
   

7. xz <image.raw>
   

8.  sudo arm-image-installer --image <image-name.raw.xz> --media <path-to-your-usb-device-or-disk-like-/dev/sdd> --resizefs --showboot --args 'clk_ignore_unused pd_ignore_unused'
   

Note: at the time of writing, if you are booting from a USB like me, you need to add modprobe.blacklist=qcom_q6v5_pas rd.driver.blacklist=qcom_q6v5_pas to args in the arm-image-installer command (which adds them as arguments to the kernel in the grub config).

Now, you should have a disk that you can boot on the laptop with secureboot disabled.

I have a system up now!

Next Steps

My next goal is to determine which CI changes need to be made to Rawhide to enable every ISO to boot OOTB! Live images would be a major QOL improvement!

Special Thanks

Without @nirik and @dennis gilmore in the Fedora-ARM matrix channel, this would not have been possible! KUDOS and thank you for being the best of us!

[kmilos (Miloš Komarčević)]

@gurnben

First Update: Finding Community

There is also arm - Fedora mailing-lists and Architectures/ARM - Fedora Project Wiki (possibly not up to date?)

[psarapkin (Peter Sarapkin)]

Hi Gurney.

Thanks.

I’m trying to be active - such as time allows me to be ))

As you said earlier - if you want to feel linux on your laptop - try Ubuntu. So I did it. And you see, it looks great. Ubuntu has a good tool - qcom-firmware-extract - which can extract firmware from Microsoft partition with windows, or… You can to download firmware from Asus website, extract it to specific folder

sudo qcom-firmware-extract -d $(pwd)/firmware/Windows/System32/DriverStore/FileRepository/

“firmware” is your folder, $(pwd) because full path from the root is required, and next folders after “firmware” - is required folder structure, because of Microsoft stores drivers like this.

If you run qcom-firmware-extract without parameter “-d” it would search drivers in Microsoft partition.

So, after installing Ubuntu concept, power adapter’s percent of charge is not working (always shows “0%”), and the graphics is “Software Renderer” instead of “Adreno”.

After qcom-firmware-extract everything okey except:

• Audio
• Camera

Also, external monitor working with type-c on a hot plug, and HDMI working on a cold plug - you have to switch off laptop, connect HDMI and start.

So, here is a status of Linux aka Ubuntu on Snapdragon X Elite. Don’t take it as the Ubuntu ad, just status ))

As for creating an iso with working dtbs - it’s quite a perfect idea. I already tried it. I don’t remember all details. But my result is failure ))

What did I do? (Right away I wanna say - I don’t remember a tools that I used)
But the common Idea was

1. Unpack ISO from Fedora website
2. Inside iso we need to find bootable live CD image - unpack it too.
3. Copy dtbs to /boot/casper (or something like that folder) - inside unpacked LiveCD image
4. Pack LiveCD back
5. Pack full iso back ))

Well, I think I had to build kernel or something like that.

As " alexvinarskis" said to me at - Ubuntu 24.10 Concept ♥️ Snapdragon X Elite - #917 by alexvinarskis - Ubuntu Architectures - Ubuntu Community Hub - the are some license issues which not allows to include firmware into an image with system.

It seems, if Fedora would make official image for Snapdragon - first you will get the system with software renderer as a graphics and not working battery charge percent. Next, you would need to run something like qcom-firmware-extract - to get drivers installed.