I just updated my 2025 Moto G Stylus 5G to Android 16 only to discover the only feature I updated for doesn’t work on my device thanks to Qualcomm.
That was one of the “upside” of a samsung with an Exynos vs the Qualcomm ones
Yeah, my last phone was one of the Galaxy phones with the hardware locked bootloader. I should’ve looked a bit harder when choosing my current phone for one with a bit more open source support, but I think I’ll be pretty happy once I can get Lineage running.
I don’t think this is the fault of Qualcomm. For some reason I can’t get behind, this feature requires some virtualization mode with lowered security features. The older Qcom chips only support regular secured VMs.
This article states the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5, the latest Snapdragon chip, does not support non-protected VMs. This doesn’t seem to be a feature taking a while to be implemented, they’ve made the deliberate decision not to add support for this, just as other vendors have decided the opposite.
For some reason I can’t get behind, this feature requires some virtualization mode with lowered security features.
The usual virtualized devices like network cards (that are already supported by Linux distributions like Debian) work by the hypervisor intercepting memory access to certain memory regions. Perhaps it’s not viable to support these with the secure approach where the VM is protected from Android.
