The newest Mesa 26.0-devel code as of today has landed initial support for Qualcomm Adreno Gen 8 graphics into the Freedreno Gallium3D driver. The Adreno Gen 8 graphics so far are most notably used by the new Snapdragon X2 Elite laptop SoC with its X2-85 GPU as well as the new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 with Adreno 840 graphics.

Last week Linux 6.19 landed the DRM kernel graphics driver changes including the Adreno Gen 8 support being added to the MSM kernel driver code. Now that the kernel-side support is squared away for Linux 6.19, the user-space code can begin landing into Mesa.

Merged today for Mesa 26.0-devel was the initial Adreno Gen 8 support with a focus on the Snapdragon X2 Elite and Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 SoCs. This initial support merged so far is just for the Freedreno Gallium3D (OpenGL) driver with the Turnip Vulkan driver support for Gen 8 hardware expected to land over time.

Rob Clark commented in the merge request that landed in Git tonight:

"This series adds initial support for adreno gen8, including a840 (Kaanapali, aka Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5) and x2-85 (Glymur, aka Snapdragon x2). Currently deqp-gles2/3 pass and deqp-gles31 all pass. Desktop UI is functional (ie. gnome-shell, chrome browser, etc), and games such as supertuxkart appear to be fine.

Performance features (lrz/etc), and turnip support will come over time, as they are ready."

A nice start albeit more work left to come, especially with Vulkan being quite critical these days, but nice to see it coming relatively punctually now out of Qualcomm for the initial enablement.

Linux 6.18 and 6.19 have also been landing other hardware enablement needed for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite and 8 Elite Gen 5 SoCs.