| > 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. 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. |
> Firmware, like everyone else, and userspace is where you have the proprietary bits.
My experience with this, is moving away from the Nvidia kernel isn't practically feasible. Userspace may be a refuge, but even trying to upgrade away from the Nvidia/Ubuntu 18.04 userspace was always going to bring up general incompatibilities and small problems. The long awaited 5.10 update targets Ubuntu 20.04, just as 22.04 is progressing through beta. Backporting PCIe device drivers and modules was painful enough that I eventually gave up on my jetson adventures.
The nullr0ute URL even notes: > it’s not perfect yet and we’re actively working to fix and improve the support for the Jetson Nano [] https://nullr0ute.com/2020/11/installing-fedora-on-the-nvidi...
In my experience, perfect was too lofty of a goal for running a mainline kernel on a Jetson/Tegra. Similar to these users as well. [] https://lists.fedorahosted.org/archives/list/arm@lists.fedor...
[] https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/installing-centos-on-j...
In the end, I spent enough time trying to get the platform to work normally, that I realized I was wasting time when I could just get an x86 board for similar cost or get a Raspberry Pi CM4, and quit trying to grow the Jetson Nano out of its embedded system roots.
Nvidia needs to step it up, big time. Jetson Xavier users are finally going to get a beta for Cuda 11, when x86 and SBSA arm users had Nvidia's official Cuda 11 for almost 2 years now.