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623 points magicalhippo | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.428s | source
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Abishek_Muthian ◴[] No.42623030[source]
I'm looking at my Jetson Nano in the corner which is fulfilling its post-retirement role as a paper weight because Nvidia abandoned it in 4 years.

Nvidia Jetson Nano, A SBC for "AI" debuted with already aging custom Ubuntu 18.04 and when 18.04 went EOL, Nvidia abandoned it completely without any further updates to its proprietary jet-pack or drivers and without them all of Machine Learning stack like CUDA, Pytorch etc. became useless.

I'll never buy a SBC from Nvidia unless all the SW support is up-streamed to Linux kernel.

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1. aseipp ◴[] No.42625236[source]
The Orin series and later use UEFI and you can apparently run upstream, non-GPU enabled kernels on them. There's a user guide page documenting it. So I think it's gotten a lot better, but it's sort of moot because the non-GPU thing is because the JetPack Linux fork has a specific 'nvgpu' driver used for Tegra devices that hasn't been unforked from that tree. So, you can buy better alternatives unless you're explicitly doing the robotics+AI inference edge stuff.

But the impression I get from this device is that it's closer in spirit to the Grace Hopper/datacenter designs than it is the Tegra designs, due to both the naming, design (DGX style) and the software (DGX OS?) which goes on their workstation/server designs. They are also UEFI, and in those scenarios, you can (I believe?) use the upstream Linux kernel with the open source nvidia driver using whatever distro you like. In that case, this would be a much more "familiar" machine with a much more ordinary Linux experience. But who knows. Maybe GH200/GB200 need custom patches, too.

Time will tell, but if this is a good GPU paired with a good ARM Cortex design, and it works more like a traditional Linux box than the Jeton series, it may be a great local AI inference machine.

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2. moondev ◴[] No.42629976[source]
AGX also has UEFI firmware which allows you to install ESXi. Then you can install any generic EFI arm64 iso in a VM with no problems, including windows.