Here are some items to look for: - a device tree for the chipset for your device - a u-boot fork or patches for the chipset/device/both - a Chromebook built with that chipset, due to how ChromeOS development is done - any sign of commitment from the chipset manufacturer

This topic is a lot like early Android bootloaders before... one of the early Motorola devices. Before there was a set of expectations/framework-support/etc for unlocking. That first unlockable Motorola device, there was 9 months of every wise-guy on the Internet swearing it was just a matter of time. And often it is, but only due to what amounts to luck.

Hint: there's a reason that every single Linux enthusiast isn't running a ARM laptop. There's a reason that Linux folks are excited about the Linux on M1 project even though it means jumping through hoops and reverse engineering and playing ball with Apple.

Fedora 35: aarch64 DVD ISO should work.

Just FYI, we run our entire production api on arm on AWS. Its pretty rock stable and mature. The stability of ARM on linux is pretty much a solved problem at this point.

aarch64 works in all chromebooks - and also the AWS Graviton platform in production.

there's a nice repo that AWS maintains for this - this should be very helpful. https://github.com/aws/aws-graviton-getting-started

We are basically in the endgame here.

ARM in the cloud and ARM on the desk-top (aka, SBC and Laptops) are nearly entirely different ballgames - certainly from a user UX perspective. Basic boot support, standards around device tree, actual driver support, firmware, quirks, ecosystem challenges due to vendors and the nightmare of a gazillion kernel forks.

I was actually shocked to see that Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 already has upstream support, but AFAICT that's not a tablet/laptop chipset. And the one that is again seems to only be seeing Windows support. The other mobile chipsets with decent suppor are few and usefuls even fewer - maybe three and that's including Librem/Pinephone.

Maybe you can find me an example of the 7c/8c running, anywhere? There are at least some DTSI for some 7c boards, but again, absolutely zero consumer hardware in the wild. I spend time every month looking and the options for running a proper upstream kernel, on an Android based laptop or kernel, and every time "upstream support" is added as a crtieria, the options drop to zero.

I've never wanted to be wrong so much before, but again, I look into this pretty regularly and am involved in some development efforts that expose me to some of these realities first hand (I run everything on aarch64 except my gaming PC). It's sort of amazing, actually, to boggle at how much collective time has been spent by some many random devs at random companies and then painstankingly re-discovered by OSS folks, especially for phones/SBCs.

(granted, if you can boot upstream, it's all downhill from there these days)

See Snapdragon 7c Chromebook hardware. There's quite some of those available. The Galaxy Book Go using the same SoC uses Windows on Arm64 instead.

Quite a lot of those Windows on arm64 SoCs also ship on Chromebooks, ensuring Linux support at some point.

but i suppose any aarch64 distro

I suppose I could still use the live environment as a Linux bootstrap for installing my favorite distro, though.

If you are not on the Triple Trouble (Fedora, Arch, Ubuntu)... I would recommend you wait until your distro catches up.

Fedora is guaranteed rock stable here. Amazon Linux was originally based on RHEL and still have a lot of cross-upstreaming going on. For e.g. RHEL has support built in for 100 GBPS networking on Arm (https://access.redhat.com/solutions/5691381).