Ubuntu 24.10 Concept ♥️ Snapdragon X Elite

New image is up. I moved the Omnibook to “Waiting for test feedback”. I believe I added everything needed to make it work out of the box with some help from @glathe but there might still be bugs lurking of course.

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Just a quick check. Will I get the latest changes through an “apt upgrade” or should I still do a fresh install?

Thanks for your effort on this!

Thanks! If your machine is already installed apt upgrade is all you need. If we make any changes that require manual intervention I will announce it here.

The new image notifications are mostly for people with laptops that previously didn’t manage to install correctly.

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We now have a fix for the app crashes people have reported. The issue was missing support for our relatively new graphics cards in the mesa versions some snaps bundle. A manual workaround is described in the corresponding bug ticket.

The next meta package update should automatically fix this for everyone.

So, tested with the XPS 9345. I was already running Ubuntu 24.10 with upstream kernel and some patches. Now did a fresh install using the dev image of today. Installer livecd booted, but the 200% scaling caused the installer application to flicker intensely with black window. (I have a 3K OLED edition) I needed to change the default scaling to 100% and then the UI rendered correctly. After reboot and running the qcom firmware extractor and another reboot, everything worked!
So very nice. Only thing I notice compared to my previous linux-next kernel, is that when I boot, I see 1s of kernel messages, then a black screen, and then after 7s again the process of booting halfway through the systemd messages. I did remove “quiet splash” from the defaults and ran a update-grub. So not sure what happens there? I just want to see the whole boot process. I’ll try again compiling my own linux-next kernel as well, to see if it’s Linux kernel caused, or something Ubuntu does. Anyway, very happy that Ubuntu is taking the lead here, and happy that I can use my XPS a bit more supported. Already very impressed with the HW accel for the UI, battery level support, and nice PCIE4x4 on my NVME 2TB drive I added myself. Nice.

Ah and the CPUfreq stuff is also working now. I couldn’t get these patches to apply properly on my linux-next kernel. Nice!

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I’d suggest tweaking a few things about the ISO:

  • Take “quiet splash” out of the default boot args
  • Set “terminal_output gfxterm” (on my Surface Pro 11, “console” output tends to lock up)
  • When booted on an unsupported device, it should assume some default arguments and a device-tree, to avoid just silently exiting. Currently, the “dtb” variable becomes an empty string.
  • Add an extra boot option with “break=top” so you can try stopping boot before something turns off the display.

I’m curious how hard it will be to get Snapdragon X1 Plus to work. The Surface Pro 11 doesn’t currently have a devicetree, and even once there is one, I can’t assume the Snapdragon X1 Elite devicetree will work for the Snapdragon X1 Plus.

My machine is this, from DMI:

Manufacturer: Microsoft Corporation
ProductName: Microsoft Surface Pro with 5G, 11th Edition
SKUNumber: Surface_Pro_with_5G_11th_Edition_2077
Family: Surface

Processor Version: Snapdragon(R) X 10-core X1P64100 @ 3.40 GHz

I just tried the image of yesterday (10-22-24) to boot and install on the HP Omnibook X14. Boot worked on first try, no intervention neccessary other than selecting F9 for boot device menu. Nice :sunglasses:
Install went well, manual method overwriting my existing 24.10 installation. No graphics issues (2k screen 100%). Reboot went smooth and booted to the 6.11.0-32-qcom-x1e kernel.

What didn’t work:

  • grub menu selection from the USB stick. I have the same issue with my own multiboot image, maybe USB related. Luckily “Try or install Ubuntu” was selected and it could boot.

  • WLAN is not recognized. I used an USB-A ethernet adapter with hub (for the mouse dongle), worked :slight_smile: The driver reports no matching data in the board file - needs to be added to ath11k firmware.

  • Bluetooth reports its working, but it’s not. I have seen this that for Bluetooth to work WLAN needs to be successfully loaded, should start to work with the WLAN board file.

  • Oh the clock is really off. Therefore apt might not work as expected. I had to change the NTP server to NTP=0.pool.ntp.org 1.pool.ntp.org 2.pool.ntp.org 3.pool.ntp.org and restart systemd-timesyncd to get it to work. maybe ntp.ubuntu.com is using a different protocol that is blocked by my firewall, but its a recurring issue here.

What worked really well:

  • qcom-firmware-extract worked nicely. Very impressed. The Windows installation was already de-bitlockered bc secure boot.
  • Ubuntu Install. Genuinely impressed.

Thank you for doing this and getting it into end users hands.

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Since the x1p42 (Purwa) is a different soc it will probably have its own dtsi. But as they are pin compatible with the x1e, maybe not. They seem to be pretty much compatible.

I was a bit of a dummy and didnt extract the windows firmware before installing. I also didnt make any backup.

I tried installing this firmware deb package: https://packages.debian.org/sid/firmware-qcom-soc

But I dont think it has worked.

Thats a little sensitive, freely redistributing firmware is not allowed, at least until they make it to linux-firmware where everyone can get them.

If Windows driver is a self extracting .exe (like in case with Dell), you can download it on Ubuntu directly and unpack via unzip, eg:

unzip ~/Qualcomm-Audio-Driver_.......exe -d folderHere

And then find required firmware files by name. You would need Audio and Video drivers.

I had tried to do so but it seemed man of the files there were dll files and I couldnt figure out which were the driver modules.

Is the only other way to get these from a windows partition?

@babbleshack as I wrote in my initial post and as Alex explained above, there is no legal way for anyone to share this firmware with you.

I recommend you try to get Windows reinstalled and extract the firmware from there. Others have managed to get their a recovery image from the customer support portal of their laptop OEM so I suppose that is worth trying (you didn’t specify which device you are using).

I am not able to install the image with the T14s OLED version. After hitting install on the GRUB menu, it starts reads the USB drive then it stuck with a black screen.

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Yer sure, I was only asking and was not aware it was illegal given you guys wrote a tool to copy the files in the first place. I am sorry about that I wont ask again.

I manage to install the firmware.

I wanted to report that the my thinkpad t14s touchpad and speakers do not work after install firmware.

Also when I run apt upgrade the following packages are installed:

  • flash-kernel
  • hwe-qcom-x1e-meta
  • ubuntu-x1e-settings
  • ubuntu-x1e-settings-nogrub

It seem flash-kernel messes my boot up. After I install flash-kernel grub returns an error after starting. I can only fix this issue by reinstalling.

Thanks for the report! We are already working on a fix for this, the bug is being tracked at Bug #2085506 “[X1E] Ubuntu Concept on Lenovo T14s Gen 6 with eDP...” : Bugs : ubuntu-concept and I expect a fix to make it into the next update

Yer sure, I was only asking and was not aware it was illegal given you guys wrote a tool to copy the files in the first place. I am sorry about that I wont ask again.

No worries. It might seem banal but there is a big difference between you using tools to copy your own files from you legal copy of the firmware to others sharing theirs which is not allowed by the license of those files.

I wanted to report that the my thinkpad t14s touchpad and speakers do not work after install firmware.

Touchpad not working is something I have not heard before, is any error showing up in your dmesg?

It seem flash-kernel messes my boot up. After I install flash-kernel grub returns an error after starting. I can only fix this issue by reinstalling.

Flash kernel SHOULD install your device tree. Which version is installed and which one is getting installed with the upgrade? I have a t14s and have not seen this happen before, I wonder what makes the difference.

Am not sure which version I had before, but I just installed 3.107ubuntu12~ppa9 by mistake :upside_down_face: .

Touchpad not working is something I have not heard before, is any error showing up in your dmesg?

Nothing jumps out and the errors dont seem related?

 sudo dmesg | grep error
[    0.224312] integrity: Couldn't get size: Unknown error code (0x8000000000000003)
[    0.224347] integrity: Couldn't get size: Unknown error code (0x8000000000000003)
[    0.538986] qcom-ice 1d90000.crypto: probe with driver qcom-ice failed with error -95
[    0.806885] pcieport 0006:00:00.0: DPC: error containment capabilities: Int Msg #0, RPExt- PoisonedTLP- SwTrigger- RP PIO Log 0, DL_ActiveErr-
[ 1996.930074] xhci-hcd xhci-hcd.0.auto: xHC error in resume, USBSTS 0x1019, Reinit
[ 3617.478350] xhci-hcd xhci-hcd.0.auto: xHC error in resume, USBSTS 0x1019, Reinit

If you look at the ~ppa9 diff it does not contain anything that should make a difference for our machines.
I suspect the problem you are seeing might be another bug and the correlation with flash-kernel just coincidence. When that happens and you press F12 on boot, do you still have a single Ubuntu entry? Can you try rebooting a few more times next time that happens. I do see sporadic random errors. Maybe try unplugging everything.

I just rebooted, after grub I see this display and then grub is presented, however my key presses do not work.

When I press F12, there is no grub efi entry but there is a Ubuntu entry. When I use the entry grub is presented and this time I am able to select Ubuntu and boot the the system.

Also when I press the fn key a touchpad with a X symbol is displayed.

This seems to be a bug related to grub or the t14s firmware. I have only seen it on this hardware before and not seen any other reports. Probably time to add a bug in our tracker. I currently don’t have a better solution than trying it a few more times, on my machine this seems to happen semi randomly.