Qualcomm Is Already Readying Open-Source Patches For Their Server Chips

Last month Qualcomm announced they made big advancements with its server ecosystem by showing off a Server Development Platform with a 24-core ARMv8 SoC. This work is now being followed close behind with open-source enablement patches.

The Server Development Platform that Qualcomm was talking about is a 24-core 64-bit ARM SoC as part of their road-map to entering the server space and compete with the likes of AMD and Intel.

This SDP was running "a standard Linux distribution" with the Linux 4.2 kernel, While it's still not clear when Qualcomm SoCs will reach production servers, they're already pushing out related open-source patches.

This afternoon I noticed this patch to add initial Qualcomm support to GCC. Jim Wilson of Linaro explained, "This adds an option for the Qualcomm server parts, qdf24xx, just optimizing like a cortex-a57 for now, same as how the initial Samsung exynos-m1 support worked. This was tested with armv8 and aarch64 bootstraps and make check."

Hopefully more patches follow, particularly for the enablement within the mainline Linux kernel. Hopefully Qualcomm's 64-bit ARM servers will end up playing nicely with the complete open-source stack.

More details on Qualcomm's server efforts as they become available.