That's true Qualcomm in general, but is fortunately outdated for the Snapdragon Elite X (and only the X). Qualcomm has been upstreaming patches to Linus' tree[1] - but only for the Elite X - the Elite P processors get the classic Qualcomm treatment.
You're mangling Qualcomm's branding to the point that it's impossible to be sure what you're trying to say. Qualcomm's current laptop SoCs are called "Snapdragon X Elite" or "Snapdragon X Plus" or "Snapdragon X", all derived from various bins of two SoC designs, and all pretty much in the same boat for driver support purposes. "Snapdragon X2 Elite" and lesser siblings are due in the first half of next year, so a respectable degree of Linux support would mean having driver support for those chips in an upstream kernel release now so that there might be a mainstream distro supporting the hardware at some point in the quarter after the hardware ships.
My apologies to you and the entire Qualcomm marketing team for my brand-guideline violations - I was going off the top of my head. What I meant in my inscrutable comment was: "Elite X" => "X Elite", "Elite P" => "X Plus", I really should not have mangled the products using such an elegant and intuitive naming convention.
Ok, so having clarified the naming, it still looks like you're wrong about which chips are getting driver support upstreamed, because the Snapdragon X Plus parts are (with maybe one exception, IIRC) literally the same chip as the Snapdragon X Elite parts. Do you really believe that the upstream Linux kernel would accept patches that are specifically crafted to only work on certain bins of the chip, or to fail to enable a peripheral if not enough of the CPU cores are enabled?
Don't take my word for it - go to the Ubuntu Concept Snapdragon thread[1] and search for "plus" or "x1p".
> Do you really believe that the upstream Linux kernel would accept patches that are specifically crafted to only work on certain bins of the chip, or to fail to enable a peripheral if not enough of the CPU cores are enabled?
It takes more than a kernel patch to boot a laptop. Qualcomm has been neglecting to release the dtbs for Plus laptops. If you want good peripheral support, don't buy a "plus" variant. Getting back to your question, the answer is "Yes, Linux has always accepted patches that only work on some configurations" with no requirement to support all h/w configuration variants. Infact, some configurations are so obscure only the submitter can test - the maintainer/subsystem chief/Linus may not even know what the potential variants are.
I don't think your link contains the evidence you think it does. I'm not seeing anything that looks like Qualcomm contributing device trees on behalf of system OEMs, for any of the Snapdragon X products, so I don't see how you can claim that they're being selective. It looks like the device trees are mostly being reverse-engineered by the community, adding new system support derived from device trees for systems that already have some support.
Do you have any clear instances of Qualcomm contributing something that's specific to Snapdragon X Elite parts and does not work for Snapdragon X Plus bins of the same silicon?
Or even for the more general issue: have you ever seen a Linux driver include arbitrary restrictions that make it refuse to work on identical hardware just because the marketing name for that bin of the same silicon was different?
> Do you have any clear instances of Qualcomm contributing something that's specific to Snapdragon X Elite parts and does not work for Snapdragon X Plus bins of the same silicon?
You're getting caught up by inconsistencies in an argument you brought up. Which suggests the argument itself is flawed.
My unchanged position is Snapdragon X Elite laptops have better Linux support than the Plus variants. You thought I was wrong on that count - but I wasn't (see the thread).
Qualcomm only ever pledged to support Elite processors, and perhaps not coincidentally all of the Plus laptops require reversing- this is enough for me to draw conclusions. If you need the technical root cause, feel free to delve into why the originally supported models with devicetres had Elite chips.