| Upstream kernel support is a bit sparse for the non-server boards. When I was looking around, there was some stuff in the $500 to $2000 range: Nvidia's usual Jetson/Tegra lineup - sometimes has decent CPUs - Good luck running anything other than Nvidia's slowly updated Kernel with blobs all over. Support drops real fast for older boards, leaving one stuck on old kernels (Jetson Nano and its upstream family was "EOL'd" in terms of kernel upgrades a while ago, even though Nvidia will still gladly take your money for a new Jetson Nano).
- Has a lot of Nvidia stuff attached, so you do get a GPU and a PCIe slot. NXP LayerScape - lots of CPU cores, but not great ones - Claims 2nd highest level of ARM Systemready, so it may work with mainline kernels? - Has a lot of networking stuff attached, since this seems to be the successor to generations of PPC networking chips. Apple - IMO, you already know the pros and cons, and will have already decided to purchase a Mac M1 or not by now. - Popular vendor with a tendency to not make too many different variants, so some are trying to mainline device support in the Linux kernel (Asahi linux). Qualcomm's developer platform for WoA - Somewhat limited in specs and afaik, no mainline kernel support of note. There are others in this range, such as Amazon's Annapurna Labs, Marvell's various SoCs, Broadcomm, Ampere, etc. IMO, none of them really target consumers or workstations. Some (Marvell, Broadcomm) treat simple public datasheets and documentation as a sin - Marvell's takedowns of fmr XScale documentation in particular. Even Nvidia isn't quite this prudish with their documentation, though they do hold back a bit vs the big x86 giants. Annapurna is found all over the place (Qnap NAS & Mikrotik routers are two places I've been surprised to find them), so there may be reclaimed consumer hardware, but Amazon is similarly stingy with documentation. Ultimately, I don't feel it is really the year of the ARM workstation quite yet. |
Note that the Jetson Nano is supported pretty well by Fedora with a fully upstream kernel. This includes GPU acceleration through Nouveau, without reclocking catches.
And just before deprecating support for it entirely (won't get BSP releases beyond JetPack 4.x), they gave it u-boot on SPI with the UEFI module, which wasn't used at all before.
https://nullr0ute.com/2020/11/installing-fedora-on-the-nvidi...
The new BSP release that is released tomorrow in public preview is Xavier onwards only, and sets the baseline to Linux 5.10, with UEFI across the board.
The older BSP release that supports Tegra X1 onwards, including the Jetson Nano, will continue getting security updates for years to come. Just don't expect new features anymore on the NVIDIA binary UM driver stack.
> slowly updated Kernel with blobs all over
It's a heavily diverged kernel tree, but it's all GPLv2, including the full GPU kernel-mode driver (https://nv-tegra.nvidia.com/r/gitweb?p=linux-nvgpu.git;a=sum...) for those. (there's no binary kernel modules present at all on the platform)
Firmware, like everyone else, and userspace is where you have the proprietary bits.