OSS + ELC EU 2026

Booting mainline Linux on a Snapdragon SoC is a great step, but it is very different from shipping a product. In standard vendor BSPs, power and performance tuning is often hidden behind blobs and downstream hacks. When you build a commercial device entirely on upstream Linux and U-Boot, you lose those vendor shortcuts. You have to understand the hardware deeply to balance battery life and processing power.

In this talk, we will share our war story of shipping a real-world consumer product based on Snapdragon SoC using mainline Linux & U-Boot. We will guide you through our optimization journey, starting from the initial dev kit. We will see how we used the Linaro DebugBoard to profile and tune power consumption across different sleep states and active workloads. We will talk about leveraging standard kernel power management frameworks instead of relying on downstream workarounds, which helps keep the system easily maintainable.

We will explain how we identified power regressions and traced performance bottlenecks using upstream tools. Finally, we will look at the practical trade-offs we had to make to deliver a highly responsive, low-power device while staying close to mainline