Ubuntu 24.10 Concept ♥️ Snapdragon X Elite

Yes, if you nuke your system, you would need to re-extract the firmware. Depending on OEM, you may be able to download these binaries directly from device support page instead of extracting from live windows partition. You can do that for Asus (called BSP package), Dell. Afaik Lenovo didn’t publish any for Yoga, so that won’t work. You can then extract and flatten the .exe via 7z e filename.exe, fool qcom-firmware-extract which expects Windows/System32/DriverStore/FileRepository path by creating it, placing files there, and running firmware extract on that folder. Vuala, no need for Windows partition:

mkdir -p ~/firmware/Windows/System32/DriverStore/FileRepository
7z -y e YourDownoadedFilename.exe -ofirmware/Windows/System32/DriverStore/FileRepository
sudo qcom-firmware-extract -d ~/firmware
# reboot to apply changes

Ideally, one day these firmware will be available ‘automatically’ when installing linux, if OEMs share it to linux-firmware. So far, only Lenovo did for a few models. Its a silly legal copyright issue, but without OEMs uploading it there, we all have to personally extract it, and cannot share it with others as its non-redistributable.

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