The MSM8953 relies heavily on the RPM for power management. A driver that simply enables a clock or regulator without notifying the RPM will fail when the system enters Low Power Modes (LPM).
The MSM8953 is no longer supported by Qualcomm’s mainline CAF (end-of-life was in 2021). However, the open-source community has stepped up. The msm8953-mainline project aims to upstream all necessary drivers into the official Linux kernel. As of 2025, the status is: msm8953 for arm64 driver high quality
For most users, the highest quality drivers will remain the CAF-based kernels maintained by the custom ROM community. These drivers are battle-tested by millions of devices. The MSM8953 relies heavily on the RPM for power management
Low-quality drivers manifest as:
On ARM64, cache coherency and SMMU (System Memory Management Unit) configurations amplify these bugs. A poorly written driver corrupts DMA buffers across the entire SoC. For most users, the highest quality drivers will
for i in 1..100; do
echo mem > /sys/power/state
sleep 5
rtcwake -m mem -s 10
dmesg | grep -i "crash\|panic\|watchdog"
done