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Qualcomm Snapdragon chips will support Android's Linux terminal

I was catching up on old news last week, and came across a Google blog post that seems to have fallen under the radar.

>MediaTek recently announced support of the pKVM-backed On-device AI seal on MediaTek Dimensity 9600 Pro, and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipsets will also support our architecture via AVF as we expand across the broader silicon ecosystem.

For context, the Linux development environment on Android allows you to run Debian in a non-protected virtual machine on supported hardware (Tensor, select Exynos, and select Mediatek chips). Snapdragon chips don't support running non-protected VMs because they use Gunyah as the hypervisor. Switching the hypervisor to pKVM means that Snapdragon chips will support running non-protected VMs, allowing for the Linux VM to work.

The Snapdragon X Elite Dell and HP Googlebooks also serve as real-life examples of this. All Googlebooks support a pKVM hypervisor, and the Linux terminal app is present and functional on the aforementioned laptops. Additionally, we can verify support for pKVM and non-protected VMs using adb. Here's the output from a Dell Googlebook:

adb shell /apex/com.android.virt/bin/vm info
Both protected and non-protected VMs are supported.
Hypervisor version: 0.0.1
/dev/kvm exists.
/dev/vfio/vfio exists.
VFIO-platform is supported.
Assignable devices:
Available OS list: "microdroid"
Debug policy: Ok(DebugPolicy { log: false, ramdump: false, adb: false })
Updatable VM is supported.

The only question left is whether devices with the latest Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 and 8 Elite Gen 6 chips support the Linux terminal app. If you have one of those devices, feel free to test it and report back in the comments.

Lastly, in related news that probably doesn't deserve its own post, I was able to test and confirm the Samsung Galaxy A08 4G (Mediatek Helio G99) supports running non-protected VMs. Unfortunately, the Linux terminal app is unable to connect to the VM just like the Galaxy Tab S12 series. To my knowledge, it's the first Helio G99 device to support it. Notably, other devices with the Helio G99 don't support it, including older Samsung devices on Android 16 like the A07 4G, and A17 4G.

Lastly lastly (I promise), I was also able to test and confirm the S26 FE supports the Linux terminal. There weren't any doubts about the Exynos 2500 having support, but it hasn't been tested and confirmed until now.

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