Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pta2002 14 days ago
Nowadays upstream Linux with UEFI mostly works, with their out of tree drivers. I’ve managed to make it work in NixOS with the stock kernel. Look at the open embedded L4T project, they have some recipes for building that. No need to use nvidia’s kernel anymore!

Also, supposedly on the second half of 2026 they were going to be moving even more stuff out of their Jetson-specific drivers as they already do for their slightly newer chips (so you could use the standard drivers, and standard CUDA builds). Let’s see how that turns out.
2 comments
NooneAtAll3 14 days ago
> with their out of tree drivers

rephrase please?

link
pta2002 13 days ago
They’ve got external kernel modules that they use for some hardware that is not supported upstream, namely the GPU, but also some things like Ethernet I think. Everything else is upstream though, so the situation is similar to a regular NVIDIA GPU.

Who would’ve thought that NVIDIA started upstreaming stuff once they realized how much money Linux is making them?

link
NooneAtAll3 13 days ago
ahhh, it's out-of-tree as in one word

I thought it was "out of three" or something

human parser error :/

link
gh02t 14 days ago
Yeah, one of my bigger complaints especially on the Nano was the GPU only had really limited model support (iirc, mostly tflite but maybe I'm misremembering) and it sounds like the newer ones are more normal. That and what seems from the docs to be better headless support would be major improvements. Going further to mainline distro support would make them interesting to me again.

I was always disappointed by the Nano as it was a pretty capable device, but it seemed like not many people picked it up as a platform for cool things which I always attributed to the software.

link