Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 (MSM8998)

Qualcomm MSM8998
	; MSM8998 in ceramic package
Manufacturer	Qualcomm
Name	MSM8998
Codenames	msmcobalt/apqcobalt
Architecture	aarch64
CPU	4x 2.45 GHz Kryo 280 Gold, 4x 1.9 GHz Kryo 280 Silver
GPU	Adreno 540
Year	2017
Process	10nm
Mainline	yes
Community Page	https://gitlab.com/msm8998-mainline
Components
CPU	Partial
UART	Works
Storage	Works
USB	Works
Display	Partial
GPU	Broken
Pinctrl	Works
I²C	Works
SPI
Audio	Works
Video
Thermal	Works
WiFi	Works
Bluetooth	Works
Modem	Partial
GPS	Works
Camera
NPU
Suspend
Ethernet

MSM8998 (or Snapdragon 835) is a high-end Qualcomm SoC released in 2017 with mainline support originally added for the MTP (proven reference design) board towards the end of 2018.

Devices

Device	Codename	Mainline
Essential Phone (PH1)	essential-mata	N
F(x)tec Pro1(X)	fxtec-qx1000	Y
Google Pixel 2 / XL	google-walleye, google-taimen	P
HTC U11	htc-ocn
Motorola Moto Z2 Force	motorola-nash	N
Nubia Z17	nx563j	Y
OnePlus 5	oneplus-cheeseburger	Y
OnePlus 5T	oneplus-dumpling	Y
Samsung Galaxy Note 8 (Qualcomm)	samsung-greatqlte
Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 (Wi-Fi)	samsung-gts4lwifi	P
Sony Xperia XZ Premium	sony-maple
Sony Xperia XZ1	sony-poplar
Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact	sony-lilac
Xiaomi Mi 6	xiaomi-sagit	Y

Booting

Assuming you derived your board DTS from the MSM8998 MTP ones, you'll likely notice a built kernel doesn't actually boot without any changes. This has been tracked down to CoreSight tracing activating, which seems to cause kernel panics on retail hardware. As per the linked patch, simply delete the added etf, etm*, etr, funnel*, replicator1 & stm nodes from your DTS.

Additionally enabling some options such as CONFIG_MSM_GPUCC_8998 may still cause the kernel to panic anyway. To avoid disabling "unused clocks" during late_initcall(), append clk_ignore_unused to your cmdline which can be done via modifying the bootimg, bootargs on DTS or setting CONFIG_CMDLINE in defconfig.

Display

Support for displays is currently marked as partial since mainline MSM8998 is completely missing device tree bindings for the MMCC, MDSS, MDP5 & DSI (as of 2020-11-16). However, unofficial patches for these are floating around and they seem to be fully working (as tested on the OnePlus 5 with a Samsung S6E3FA5 DSI cmd mode panel on Linux 5.10)!

For starters your best bet would be to setup simplefb though which utilizes the device framebuffer left active by the UEFI bootloader (Qualcomm XBL).

NOTE: Devices using DSC (Display Stream Compression) like the Pixel 2 XL will mostly likely not support simplefb!

1. Enable CONFIG_FB_SIMPLE in your defconfig

2. Apply a patch like this one to your board DTS while (as needed) replacing 1080 with the screen width and 1920 with the screen height (in pixels):

$ cat msm8998-simplefb.patch

--- a/arch/arm64/boot/dts/qcom/msm8998-oneplus-cheeseburger.dtsi
+++ b/arch/arm64/boot/dts/qcom/msm8998-oneplus-cheeseburger.dtsi
@@ -10,10 +10,36 @@
 	aliases {
 		serial0 = &blsp2_uart1;
 		serial1 = &blsp1_uart3;
+		display0 = &framebuffer0;
 	};
 
 	chosen {
-		stdout-path = "serial0:115200n8";
+		#address-cells = <2>;
+		#size-cells = <2>;
+		ranges;
+
+		/* HACK: Use "display0" for simplefb; for UART console use "serial0:115200n8" instead */
+		stdout-path = "display0";
+
+		/*
+		 * Address and size extracted on-device using the following:
+		 * # strings /dev/block/bootdevice/by-name/xbl | grep 'Display Reserved'
+		 */
+		framebuffer0: framebuffer@9d400000 {
+			compatible = "simple-framebuffer";
+			reg = <0 0x9d400000 0 0x2400000>;
+			width = <1080>;
+			height = <1920>;
+			stride = <(1080 * 4)>;
+			format = "a8r8g8b8";
+		};
+	};
+
+	reserved-memory {
+		cont_splash_mem: memory@9d400000 {
+			reg = <0 0x9d400000 0 0x2400000>;
+			no-map;
+		};
 	};
 
 	vph_pwr: vph-pwr-regulator {

USB

Enabling USB on MSM8998 boards will differ between devices which use a USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 port.

Needed modules on defconfig side should include the following (and even QUSB2 can be dropped later if it turns out your device doesn't use this):

CONFIG_USB_CONFIGFS=y
CONFIG_PHY_QCOM_QMP=y
CONFIG_PHY_QCOM_QUSB2=y

In general (and for USB 3.0 devices) the following in your DTS should be enough and you'll hopefully see the device detected on your host (assuming the kernel is configured with the needed modules):

&usb3_dwc3 {
	dr_mode = "peripheral"; /* Force to peripheral until we have Type-C hooked up */
};

For USB 2.0 devices utilizing the QUSB PHY however that alone isn't enough and you should remove the usb3phy node entirely from your DTS & add the following configuration:

MSM8998 USB 2.0 configuration (DTS)

&usb3 {
	/* Disable USB3 pipe_clk requirement */
	qcom,select-utmi-as-pipe-clk;
};

&usb3_dwc3 {
	/* Drop the unused USB 3 SuperSpeed PHY */
	phys = <&qusb2phy>;
	phy-names = "usb2-phy";

	/* We can only operate at USB 2.0 speeds */
	maximum-speed = "high-speed";
};

In case you've adjusted the l24 regulator minimum value below 3088000 μV to match downstream and USB doesn't work with no (obvious) issues on device dmesg, try setting it back to to this higher 3.08V value to see if it helps; this was the case on the OnePlus 5 for example.

UFS internal storage

WARNING: IF YOUR DEVICE IS A SONY XPERIA DO NOT NEVER EVER EVER TRY TO ENABLE UFS ON NON-VENDOR/NON-SODP KERNELS! IT WILL ERASE THE CHIP CLEAN (INCLUDING THE BOOTLOADER!) CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED

To enable the device's internal UFS 2.1 host controller (and 14nm UFS QMP PHY), compile the kernel with the following modules enabled:

CONFIG_SCSI_UFS_QCOM=y
CONFIG_PHY_QCOM_QMP=y

You can optionally set CONFIG_SCSI_SCAN_ASYNC=y for some additional speedup while booting. Consider also enabling CONFIG_QFMT_V2 if you intend on writing data to a userdata partition formatted by Android where disk quotas are normally enabled by default for ext4 volumes.

WLAN

For WLAN to work you need:

1. On the kernel side:

The MSS (modem) remoteproc needs to be running with firmware extracted from the device partitions
DTS needs to point to the firmware filenames under /lib/firmware/
Currently if you get FW details printed in dmesg from ath10k with nothing else seemingly happening, you'll most likely have to fake an MSA ready indication (Not needed since Linux 6.11, see 737abcabe97bb37e38be2504acd28ad779dbaf3d arm64: dts: qcom: msm8998: set qcom,no-msa-ready-indicator for wifi )

2. On the userspace side:

Follow steps from jhugo's 5.5 MSM8998 Wi-Fi README (it's not perfect but should work)
Place all needed device firmware files to /lib/firmware/
Make sure your OEM wlanmdsp.mbn is in the same directory with modem.mdt (or modem.mbn)!
Install the following pmOS packages: pd-mapper, tqftpserv, qrtr & rmtfs
Enable the services (rc-update add SERVICE_NAME boot) for all of the above except qrtr (it's started automatically if needed)
Run diag-router from https://github.com/andersson/diag in case MSS remoteproc keeps crashing and networks can be seen in e.g. nmtui soon after booting

This page could use some expansion. If you'd like to help out, feel free to edit this article!
In particular: The WLAN notes are just a rough sketch

iwd

By default iwd (on the OnePlus 5 at least) has an issue where it will refuse to connect, apparently related to EAPoL. This can be worked around by adding the following to /etc/iwd/main.conf (create the file if it doesn't exist).

[General]
ControlPortOverNL80211=false

"the EAPoL handshake is performed but we keep receiving packet 3/4 again and again on a 1 second interval. The replay key counter is never being increased so iwd just droped the packet and after a while the AP gives up"

The suggestion is either a wifi firmware bug, the driver not supporting nl80211 properly or an issue with the access point.

Bluetooth

Getting Bluetooth to work should be trivial assuming you compile the kernel with the following modules enabled:

CONFIG_RFKILL=m
CONFIG_BT_RFCOMM=y
CONFIG_BT_BNEP=y
CONFIG_BT_HIDP=y
CONFIG_BT_HS=y
CONFIG_BT_LE=y

After those are set and you've copied the needed kernel modules over to the rootfs in /lib/modules/ you just need the following firmware files in /lib/firmware/qca/:

crbtfw21.tlv
crnv21.bin

Those can be supplied directly from linux-firmware and they should work fine, but if not you'll need to grab the files from your device's firmware partitions.

Audio

OnePlus 5&5T has tfa9894 codec, so additional modules are needed. Add tfa98xx source code （Modyfied from https://github.com/J0SH1X/tfa98xx） 11 Download: https://stor.classfun.cn:4443/s/xPCE 5 Extract it and then copy the inc and src folder to linux/sound/soc/codecs

Modify Makefile and Kconfig： cd ~/workspace/linux/sound/soc/codecs Modify Makefile：nano Makefile:

snd-soc-tfa989x-objs := tfa989x.o
+snd-soc-tfa98xx-objs += src/tfa98xx.o
+snd-soc-tfa98xx-objs += src/tfa_container.o
+snd-soc-tfa98xx-objs += src/tfa_dsp.o
+snd-soc-tfa98xx-objs += src/tfa_init.o
snd-soc-tlv320adc3xxx-objs := tlv320adc3xxx.o

obj-$(CONFIG_SND_SOC_TFA9879)  += snd-soc-tfa9879.o
+obj-$(CONFIG_SND_SOC_TFA98XX) += snd-soc-tfa98xx.o
obj-$(CONFIG_SND_SOC_TFA989X)  += snd-soc-tfa989x.o

Modify Kconfig:nano Kconfig

imply SND_SOC_TFA989X
+imply SND_SOC_TFA98xx
imply SND_SOC_TLV320ADC3XXX

add it in Kconfig:

+config SND_SOC_TFA98XX
+        tristate "NXP/Goodix TFA98XX (TFA1) amplifiers"
+        depends on I2C
+        select REGMAP_I2C
+        help
+          Enable support for NXP (now Goodix) TFA98XX (TFA1 family) speaker
+          amplifiers, e.g. TFA98XX.
+          Note that the driver currently bypasses the built-in "CoolFlux DSP"
+          and does not support (hardware) volume control.
+

GPS

GPS should "just work" when the modem is up. You should check whether the Position Determination Service (PDS) is running using qrtr-lookup:

 $ qrtr-lookup | grep PDS
        16       2        0    0    83 Location service (~ PDS v2)

After this you can essentially install GPSD with the Qualcomm PDS patch, configure it to use pds://any as the device during runtime and you should be good to go.

Real-time clock (RTC)

The RTC module found on the PM8998 PMIC block works with CONFIG_RTC_DRV_PM8XXX enabled. It can be easily tested from userspace like so:

# cd /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/
# echo $((`cat since_epoch`+120)) > wakealarm

After running that and fully powering down the device it should power on by itself soon afterwards (2 minutes later to be exact).

Haptics

Haptics are supported, see Haptics for more details.

Who's working on it

User:Deathmist (@deathmist on Matrix)
User:R0551 (@r0551 on Matrix)
User:Degdag (@degdag on Matrix) [working on Xiaomi Mi 6]
User:Caleb (@caleb on Matrix) [working on Pixel 2 XL]
User:learnchungchen
SoMainline [working on F(x)tec Pro1 & SoMC Yoshino]

(feel free to add yourself here if you're working on MSM8998 mainlining!)