Ubuntu 24.10 Concept ♥️ Snapdragon X Elite

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We are happy to announce the next iteration of our Ubuntu concept image for Qualcomm Snapdragon laptops with our new X Elite developer preview. This new image has been rebased on the latest Ubuntu 24.10 release and comes with all the great benefits of Oracular Oriole.

Our goal is to provide a developer preview targeted at early adopters who aren’t afraid of bleeding edge platform support and breaking changes. The Ubuntu concept format allows us to iterate quickly and test new experimental features to learn how we can improve the Ubuntu arm64 desktop experience in our coming releases.

While our last concept image focused exclusively on the Lenovo Thinkpad X13s, this time we want to try something more ambitious: A single Ubuntu image that “just works” on as much Snapdragon X Elite hardware as we or the community can get our hands on to see how the future of a generic arm64 installer might look like.

Currently our image known to work best on the Lenovo Thinkpad T14s. To expand that list we are looking for help from our community, see Contributing below for more info.

Disclaimer:
The provided image and all included software is experimental and not suited for production use. The image comes without warranty or official support and is provided on a best effort basis.

Getting Started

Start by downloading our installer image and flashing it to a usb drive. We recommend backing up your Windows installation, creating a recovery drive and installing Ubuntu next to Windows in a dual-boot setup. For the time being Windows is required to install firmware updates. For the installer to work Secure Boot has to be disabled in the BIOS settings and we recommend using a USB-C port since that works more reliably on all our supported machines.

Some features require additional firmware files that we can not distribute in Ubuntu until they are available under a suitable license. As a workaround they can be extracted from an existing Windows installation, either manually or with the packaged qcom-firmware-extract tool. After rebooting into your installed system run sudo apt install qcom-firmware-extract and sudo qcom-firmware-extract and reboot again to load the new firmware.

What works

Devices we have seen successful installations on:

Currently not (yet) supported:

Contributing

All our source code is publicly available on Launchpad in our ~ubuntu-concept/x1e PPA and as git repositories under the ~ubuntu-concept launchpad team.

An easy way to help us enable more hardware is supplying us with more information on machines we don’t currently have physical access to by opening a bug on Launchpad against the ubuntu-concept project and tagging it with your hardware. For examples you can have a look at our open bugs.

Advanced users can use livefs-editor to modify the image and change device trees, grub config, kernel etc to get it working on more hardware.

A guide for building our concept kernel the Ubuntu way is available here on discourse.
We are planning to publish a more detailed guide on how to build your own images and porting to new hardware in the future.

Thanks

We would like to thank the open source community and in particular #aarch64-laptops on OFTC, Linaro and everyone involved in the Linux upstream kernel development that enables this project, as well as Lenovo, Qualcomm and Dell who supported us with valuable feedback and test hardware!

Update 1:

We are seeing lots of valuable contributions from the community and managed to already get a few more devices tested and managed to expand our list of devices that the installer supports. I added a new What works section above to provide an overview of what works.

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Hello.

Does not boot on Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Edge.

OpenBSD 7.6 recently added initial support, can confirm OpenBSD 7.6 boots on GB4E. Please get these changes into the kernel, it seems like the PR stalled out.

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Hi @rounda, I just replied to your bug report on launchpad. Marcus’ patches on the mailing list seem to be reviewed and acked by the Linaro folks, not sure why it stalled. I have cherry-picked them into our tree for now! New kernel is already building.

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I have the Surface Pro 11, specifically the model with 5G mobile broadband, and I’d love to run Ubuntu on it, but I don’t see any signs of a Surface Pro 11 devicetree on the mailing list.

I tried the image, and grub locks up if you don’t press enter immediately, so I can’t take out “quiet splash” first. Why would you have those set on an experimental image?

If I try to boot the kernel, Grub finishes, then the machine reboots a moment later. If I manually try another dtb (the default is empty string), it boots until the backlight turns off, and then I can’t tell what happens.

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Here is a first device tree for the Surface Pro 9 5G, it is still work in progress with this patch set:

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240903224252.6207-1-jerome.debretagne@gmail.com/

The built-in screen is not fully supported, it currently works only when using the software fallback with this grub boot option :

module_blacklist=msm

Otherwise, I have Debian working on the Surface Pro 9 5G for many months now after a manual installation, it is working quite well. Any help to improve the supported feature set would be really appreciated!

(Edit : the SP9 5G is not running a Snapdragon X Elite but the previous SoC Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3)

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So I was trying to get it working with Asus Vivobook S15, it doesnt directly work, I was able to compile this dts and replace in iso with livefs-edit, and it worked.
USB A doesnt work with included kernel, but weirdly with linux 6.12 rc1 (from Google drive shared on #aarch64-laptops on OFTC), USB A works but Keyboard stops working.

I did not install it to drive but otherwise experience was good on live image. I did run geekbench in live image and got decent score.
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8336831

If only battery manager works as well I would love to install and try to daily drive it.

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@deepgaurav thanks for testing! This sounds like we can get that working pretty quickly. I opened a bug at Bug #2084674 “[x1e] Support Asus Vivobook S15” : Bugs : ubuntu-concept
One thing that would be useful is the product version and name as output by dmidecode -t1

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which gpu driver does it use? Freeadreno?

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Yes, freedreno from mesa 24.2.3 currently.

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It does not boot on Lenovo Yoga 7x. I’ve tried with usb drive in both modes : mbr and gpt.
the usb drive was mbr by default then I’ve changed to gpt.

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does NOT boot beyond grub on the Dell Latitude 7455

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I will try to install it on my ASUS Vivobook S 15.

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Thanks for testing, @mantarayali! I added a bug template at Bug #2084870 “[X1E] Add support for Dell Latitude 7455” : Bugs : ubuntu-concept

It would be great if you could help us fill in the missing dmidecode information!

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Thanks for the help, the Vivobook seems to not work just yet. It is missing a few tweaks that are committed to our repos but haven’t made their way into our image yet. I expect to have a new image ready by Monday. I can ping you once that is uploaded!

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It doesn’t work on the HP Omnibook X 14. The T14s Gen 6 has the same variant, but it doesn’t boot. Boots to GRUB and after making a selection, it reboots.

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Have a Yoga 7x 1tb, 32gig - set up space on HD and fastboot disabled, f12 to select iso, and the working system from the iso appears, press install and install menu shows in the bottom right corner, I set the live image to 100% scale down from 200% preset and it seams to work fine. Hit download and it’s smooth to almost the end - then the error/must stop, send bug report - sent. The system then allows reboot or play with the live image. Did this about 5 times - all with simular results. There is no grub repair offered. Hmmm

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Thanks for this, installs fine on Thinkpad t16 gen6

  • notably acpi is not present
  • firmware script does not run correctly ( cannot find the windows partition )
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Thanks for testing @snapdragonx-eliter! It looks like you were the first one to test the Omnibook so we could use a little help filling in the smbios information that we use to load the correct dtb automatically. I created a tracking bug here. I don’t think we have a device tree yet either so we will have to search the kernel mailing list for relevant diffs.

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Great, thanks for the confirmation! Do you know if your Windows installation uses bitlocker? I think we currently don’t handle the plain NTFS case well in qcom-firmware-extract but it should be relatively easy to add that to the script.

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After installing the special iso made for Dell XPS 13 9345, it works but can’t execute sudo qcom-firmware-extract. I have disabled bitlocker.

Mounting Windows Partition…
[CRITICAL] Error during reading the volume: not enough byte read.