It's such a surprise to me that there's such a strong division of who gets what chips.
Even mid range phones still get leading or enar leading edge process modes, absurd idle & low power chips, replete with connectivity options.
But if you want to run a regular OS? Now you need something special. An older slower core like the Pi or other SBC. Or x86. It seems like Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite is alas almost as fraught as the phone at being a decent regular respectable desktop core, with only some % of systems being able to install non-Windows os.
It's just wild wild wild to me. That there's such a hard division of what's available, that there hasn't been much blurring of the lines. There's some devkits available for Qualcomm chips but it's rare.
I had significant hope for a bit. It was unclear what level of support there was but there were a couple years where mainline support for Qualcomm chipsets was happening. Linux 5.17 for example in March 2022 had a bunch of Qualcomm chipsets support (845, 888, 7c), and "support" for a bunch of phones including some nice looking Xperia phones, but its so unclear how we would actually use that, how deep support went. The datas there in dtbs, telling us whether displays or USB or whatever is there, but it feels so much like there was something going on, a possibility, that we failed to see and seize, to start to make real use of these amazing devices in our own ways.
I'm also a bit bitter that the mobile chip market has consolidated down & shrivelled up. Apple and Google seem to have no interest in selling chips, Qualcomm and MediaTek are the only big players, and there's a host of smaller Unisoc and others that are seemingly as un-purchasable as the big player's chips.
The idea of a home cluster of phones makes a ton of sense. It'd make more sense if these were respectable decent computing devices. I'd love to see more stories on getting to mainline, on how we use the mainline kernel support where available. These kernel releases give the notion of hope, but mostly, it's a bunch of nerds like me clutching their Mobian running OnePlus 6/6T's (2018), and not a lot of signs that anyone knows how to use what mainline support that does show up!
Author here: I think the main problem nowadays is that most of the Android devices sold on the market are running a heavily customized version of Linux (and in most cases incredibly outdated too).
Some (newer) Android devices seem to be migrating to the "AOSP Common kernels" / "Android common kernels" [1], but I doubt this is that common outside of the Google Pixel devices.
Until the manufacturers (e.g: Oneplus, Xiaomi) will start using a close-to-mainline kernel (and distributing the sources!), we'll just have to hope that the amazing people who contributed to support arm64 devices [2] or simply porting devices to mainline, will keep doing so. Of course anyone is free to contribute - but it would be way easier if the manufacturer themselves started to help towards this goal.
Having said that, and assuming good mainline support (to be honest, for me it's enough to get access to the storage, CPU, network), my old devices generally come with a somewhat powerful octa-core SoC that can handle workloads better than my Pis. I would have to benchmark them to support my claim, but already having 4 more CPUs helps - despite they might be in weird configurations (e.g: big.LITTLE [3]).
Even mid range phones still get leading or enar leading edge process modes, absurd idle & low power chips, replete with connectivity options.
But if you want to run a regular OS? Now you need something special. An older slower core like the Pi or other SBC. Or x86. It seems like Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite is alas almost as fraught as the phone at being a decent regular respectable desktop core, with only some % of systems being able to install non-Windows os.
It's just wild wild wild to me. That there's such a hard division of what's available, that there hasn't been much blurring of the lines. There's some devkits available for Qualcomm chips but it's rare.
I had significant hope for a bit. It was unclear what level of support there was but there were a couple years where mainline support for Qualcomm chipsets was happening. Linux 5.17 for example in March 2022 had a bunch of Qualcomm chipsets support (845, 888, 7c), and "support" for a bunch of phones including some nice looking Xperia phones, but its so unclear how we would actually use that, how deep support went. The datas there in dtbs, telling us whether displays or USB or whatever is there, but it feels so much like there was something going on, a possibility, that we failed to see and seize, to start to make real use of these amazing devices in our own ways.
I'm also a bit bitter that the mobile chip market has consolidated down & shrivelled up. Apple and Google seem to have no interest in selling chips, Qualcomm and MediaTek are the only big players, and there's a host of smaller Unisoc and others that are seemingly as un-purchasable as the big player's chips.
The idea of a home cluster of phones makes a ton of sense. It'd make more sense if these were respectable decent computing devices. I'd love to see more stories on getting to mainline, on how we use the mainline kernel support where available. These kernel releases give the notion of hope, but mostly, it's a bunch of nerds like me clutching their Mobian running OnePlus 6/6T's (2018), and not a lot of signs that anyone knows how to use what mainline support that does show up!
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