Qualcomm Linux 2.0 available now: delivering on the promise of open, unified IoT development

Built for your use case, not the other way around

Most platforms ask developers to learn the architecture first, then figure out where their product fits. Qualcomm Linux 2.0 is designed the other way around.

In a broad variety of products and applications, Qualcomm Linux 2.0 is intended to meet you where your product is.

Table 2: Qualcomm Linux - sample capabilities

"Qualcomm Linux 2.0 is a major milestone, with its unified platform, upstream-first approach, and production-ready modular architecture strongly aligned with the direction we are taking with CLEA. It enables faster, simpler integration of Qualcomm SoCs into CLEA OS, allowing our customers to benefit from greater velocity and quality on a codebase that stays current from day one — and we are proud to be part of this journey." - Marco Sogli, Head of Global Software, Seco

One code base, build to scale

The most expensive line in any embedded Linux project is not the one that adds a feature; it is the one that forks the kernel. The second-most expensive is the one that adapts a distribution to a workflow that it was never designed for.

In Qualcomm Linux 1.x, the platform ships with two separate variants - a base open-source build and a custom proprietary build, each maintained independently; reflecting the tradeoffs for a platform in its first generation. Every security patch, every driver update, every kernel upgrade had to be applied twice, tested twice, and carried in parallel until support ended. That is technical debt, and it compounds with every release and with every SoC that needs to be supported.

Qualcomm Linux 2.0 sets out to fix this. There is now a single unified software stack, built on the Linux 6.18 LTS kernel and Yocto Project 6.0 (Wrynose). The result is configured as a clean upstream foundation with modular capability blocks that can be added independently. The design helps enable you to compose exactly what your product needs.

Qualcomm Linux is designed around a clean, lean Yocto-compatible board support package (BSP) layer (meta-qcom), designed natively for Yocto, not retrofitted into it. The Yocto Project certified status demonstrates architectural alignment, not just compliance. The result is a maintainable, portable foundation for any product built on Qualcomm silicon.

The foundation is fully open source, with no proprietary components. This includes a completely open-source user space for audio, display, graphics, camera, and video, fully upstreamed.

The capability overlays extend the foundation where upstream components do not fully leverage Qualcomm hardware capabilities. Each overlay – audio, graphics, camera, video, sensors, vision – is an independently selectable recipe in meta-qcom, adding Qualcomm-optimized kernel modules and user space libraries on top of the shared base without modifying it. You select what your product needs at build time or at runtime. What you do not select, you do not carry.

The production overlays address deployment requirements with the same composable model: mandatory access control, OTA update infrastructure, security hardening, virtualization, real-time kernel support. Each target is designed to address a specific production requirement without coupling to the others.

The OEM layer sits at the top. Your team adds your product-specific hardware configuration and image definition on top of the shared platform without modifying anything below it. Your differentiation lives in your layer. The shared foundation stays shared.

When you move to the next SoC, you are not porting a forked platform. Instead, you are leveraging the same modular architecture with new hardware. The base does not diverge. The debt does not accumulate. 

A fully upstream configuration has a known, community-audited security surface. Every block you leave out is weight and attack surface you do not carry.

For developers who want the full technical picture of what changed and what is available, it is all here:

Previously, two separate variants, Base and Custom each required their separate: kernel source tree, kernel image, device tree, and user space;  two build commands; and parallel maintenance as separate code branches. Qualcomm Linux 2.0 introduces a configuration with single kernel source, single kernel image, single rootfs, and a unified device tree with FIT image-based DT selection across multiple platforms. Qualcomm value-add capabilities are delivered as DLKMs (Dynamic Kernel Module packages) and user space packages individually installable or removable, with no changes to the kernel source. 

For developers, two validated configurations are available. In other words, Qualcomm Technologies builds, tests, and ships two reference build configurations: a fully upstream open-source image (qcom-multimedia-image) and a full Qualcomm value-add image (qcom-multimedia-proprietary-image). You start from a known-good, tested baseline rather than an untested combination. Driver selection between upstream and Qualcomm-optimized stacks is controlled at runtime via module exclusion lists and EFI variables for device tree overlays; no reflash is required to switch configurations.

Capability overlays: Every overlay is a discrete, versioned block – kernel modules, user space libraries, or both – that cleanly install on upstream base without modifying it. You enable what your product needs and leave the rest out. The five available overlays cover the following:

• Audio (AudioReach, hardware-accelerated processing)
• Camera (complete camX ISP pipeline)
• Graphics (Adreno GPU acceleration for OpenGL ES, OpenCL and Vulkan)
• Video (hardware-accelerated encode and decode via Iris VPU)
• Sensors (Qualcomm Sensor Hub integration, supported on certain SoCs)
• Vision (FastCV acceleration for computer vision workloads on DSP/Adreno)

Production layers: meta-selinux (SELinux mandatory access control), meta-updater (OSTree-based OTA), meta-security (hardening and auditing), meta-virtualization (Docker, Kubernetes, KVM).

OEM layers: meta-<OEM>-bsp (hardware integration), meta-<OEM>-distro (product image and package groups).

SDK layer: Qualcomm® Intelligent Multimedia Product SDK (Neural Processing, AI Engine Direct, LiteRT, Hexagon), Qualcomm® Intelligent Robotics Product SDK (ROS2 Navigation and Vision), AI frameworks (PyTorch, ONNX, TensorFlow, GStreamer, QNN)

Open development: No need to wait for a release

Qualcomm Linux 1.0 was the commitment. Qualcomm Linux 2.0 is the proof.

We develop in the open, on GitHub, in public. The foundational meta layer is continuously released and publicly available. Public CI validates every change. For developers and customers, this means the platform is built to be auditable, predictable, and not locked to a quarterly release cycle. You can fork, contribute, and build from the latest work at any time, without waiting for a release.

Qualcomm Linux has achieved Yocto Project compatible status for meta-qcom, the BSP layer. This means the meta-qcom follows all the Yocto best practices, helping enable our customers to build their own Yocto distribution, integrate additional BSP layers, and compose exactly the stack their product needs. This is particularly valuable for embedded and industrial use cases, where teams need to combine multiple hardware platforms and software layers without being locked into a single distribution model.

If you are ready to start contributing or want to know exactly what is publicly available, today, here is the full list.

• meta-qcom (master) - BSP hardware enablement layer, released continuously, tracks Yocto-tip
  meta-qcom-distro - reference distribution layer, image recipes and distro configuration
• meta-qcom-3rdparty - community and third-party platform support, open for contribution
• meta-qcom-extras - source compilation of value-add components for registered users
• meta-qcom-releases - kas lock files tagged qli-<version> for reproducible milestone builds
• Kernel (qcom-next branch tracks kernel.org release candidates), KGSL GPU driver, camera and video drivers, FastRPC, QDL, and many more open-source repositories.

Real-time performance built in, from the kernel to hardware

For industrial deployments, real-time capability is not a feature you add at the end. It is a design requirement that shapes everything from the kernel configuration to hardware architecture.

Qualcomm Linux 2.0 is designed to deliver real-time capability out-of-the-box. There is no separate real-time layer to configure or maintain, support is built directly into the platform through the Linux 6.18 LTS RT kernel, managed via recipes in the meta-qcom layer.

A real-time system designed to support deterministic event handling, with a scheduler that enforces both latency and deadline constraints across varying load conditions.

Kernel real-time via PREEMPT_RT: The platform applies PREEMPT_RT patches through the meta-qcom layer at build time, helping enable fully preemptible, deterministic kernel space scheduling. Validation uses the Linux Foundation RT test suite, including the cyclic test for measuring minimum, average and maximum latency.

Hardware real-time isolation via Real-time subsystem (RTSS) (IQ-8275 and IQ-9075 only): For use cases requiring hard, real-time behavior completely isolated from the Linux environment, selected SoCs include a dedicated RTSS that is tested and validated with FreeRTOS.

Industrial networking: Qualcomm Linux 2.0 adds support for onboard and expansion bridge attached Ethernet, DPDK for high performance packet processing, MQTT, and CAN bus.

Software support that spans your product’s entire lifetime

Qualcomm Linux releases are designed to align with the full SoC product lifetime, from the first engineering sample through active deployment, maintenance, and eventual wind-down. The overlap among major versions guarantees a supported migration path. Standard maintenance covers bug fixes and security updates. Extended lifecycle maintenance is available commercially for products that need software support beyond the standard window.

Security follows the same composable model as everything else in Qualcomm Linux 2.0. You select the security capabilities your product requires, access control, secure boot, update integrity, hardware-backed key management, workload isolation, and compose them from the same block system as your application capabilities. Security is not a single switch. It is a stack of choices, each independently selectable, each independently maintainable.

Supported platforms

Qualcomm Linux 2.0 expands platform support with new SoC families added in this generation:

• QCS6490: high performance edge AI and vision
• QCS5430: cost optimized, pin-to-pin compatible with QCS6490
• IQ-9 series: high-performance multi-core platforms for demanding edge AI and industrial compute
• IQ-8 series: advanced compute for embedded and industrial deployments
• IQ-6 series: energy-efficient platforms for cost-sensitive IoT and edge applications
• IQ-X series: new in Qualcomm Linux 2.0, targeted for Industrial IPC 

"Qualcomm Linux 2.0 represents a meaningful evolution of Qualcomm's Linux for embedded platforms. The improvements in onboarding, documentation, and overall structure make it a strong and modern foundation for new developments. The platform demonstrates a clear step forward in developer experience, enabling faster project ramp-up and more streamlined workflows. Combined with responsive support from Qualcomm, Qualcomm Linux provides a solid and reliable basis for current and future embedded designs on Tria SOMs." - Stefan Hirscher, Director of Product Marketing, Tria Technologies

What this means for you

Qualcomm Linux 2.0 aims to give you full ownership of your platform, from OS composition to update lifecycle to security, helping enable you to build and scale.

As a developer, you do not need to wait for a release or work from a snapshot build. The development branch is public, CI is public, and your pull request gets reviewed in the open like any upstream contribution. If you are bringing up a new board, meta-qcom-3rdparty is the governed home for your platform support.

One SoC, one OS, hard real-time Linux running. As a user, no need to manage a separate RTOS image or maintain a forked kernel to get deterministic behavior. When you move to the next SoC generation, your BSP layer moves with you, the base does not diverge and debt does not accumulate. Extended lifecycle support and OTA mean your software commitment matches your hardware commitment.

"At Innodisk, our objective in adopting QLI 2.0 is to establish a more scalable and maintainable software foundation for customized Qualcomm-based edge AI platforms. QLI 2.0 RC3 demonstrates meaningful progress, particularly through the KAS-based build workflow and the availability of device-tree sources within the kernel tree. These improvements give our engineering teams a more structured path for configuration management and downstream platform bring-up, helping us integrate and validate customer-specific industrial solutions with greater consistency while accelerating time-to-market for edge AI deployments." - Allen Huang, Assistant Manager, Intelligent Peripheral Appliance Division at Innodisk

The same base software that runs real-time control loop also runs AI inference pipeline. With the latest Qualcomm AI SDK 2.47 + LiteRT 2.16 + Qualcomm AI Hub you have a streamlined end-to-end workflow from model selection to on-device inference. Every target processor, CPU, GPU, Hexagon NPU, are all accessible through unified QNN APIs, PyTorch, TensorFlow, and GStreamer are all the supported AI frameworks.

Qualcomm Linux 2.0 is production ready, open, and available today. The architecture is stable, the ecosystem is growing, and Qualcomm Linux 2.1 is already in progress. Upcoming work includes open-source boot flow, OP-TEE integration. The platform gets more capable every quarter, and every product you ship makes it better. Come build with us.    

Getting Started

Qualcomm Linux 2.0 is available now. To get started:

• Documentation: docs.qualcomm.com — Qualcomm Linux 2.0 landing page, build guides, system software overview, and security documentation
• Source code and metadata layers: github.com/qualcomm-linux
• Platform page: qualcomm.com/developer/software/qualcomm-linux
• Community: Join the Qualcomm Developer Discord for direct engagement with the engineering team
• Releases: Use meta-qcom-releases kas lock files tagged qli-2.0 for a reproducible starting point
• EVK: Test and prototype your software development and hardware designs with less effort and cost on the Dragonwing IQ-9075 Evaluation Kit (EVK) or Dragonwing IQ 8275 EVK, both available now.

Special thanks to Nicolas Dechesne for the technical review of this blog.