Hello,
I understand ubuntu announced that they will be supporting jetson class computers, but unfortunately, agx is not in their release list.
I wonder if it (ubuntu for agx orin) would boot on an jetson agx industrial? I wonder if it is worth a try.
Are there any other alternatives of linux that can run on agx industrial?
Best Regards,
C.
For reference, L4T is just what one would call Ubuntu after adding the NVIDIA drivers. JetPack/SDK Manager is just the GUI front end to the actual flash software which installs L4T.
My thoughts on this is that much of the answer depends on the boot chain itself. Once you get to L4T R35.x+ it isn’t so much something about the GPU driver anymore as it is about giving control of the boot environment to the Linux kernel itself. L4T R35.x is the last release for Xavier, and the evolution of the boot stage to actual full UEFI is incomplete there. Orin works in R36.x, and this is when full UEFI boot is complete.
Jetsons do not have a BIOS, at least not in hardware. Most motherboards you are thinking about have an actual BIOS which is its own miniature operating system. Jetsons do this entirely with software, and this part is quite non-standard compared to most hardware. This is the reason why Jetsons cannot self-flash; Jetsons in recovery mode are just custom USB devices (and the flash software is a driver for the custom USB hardware). However, that entire early boot has evolved over time.
UEFI itself creates a more object-oriented approach to booting whereby after setting up power rails and clocks and minimal drivers it creates a uniform abstracted set of services defined by a standard. This stage makes the hardware more or less interchangeable if you use the abstraction. Everything in L4T R36.x is custom up until that stage of UEFI is reached, and then becomes a uniform abstract interface just like any motherboard would. You won’t reach that completely in R35.x.
The flash software still must be custom for that first part of UEFI, but once you get to that abstraction phase it becomes possible to more or less put anything on the Jetson. It just happens that Ubuntu is the only o/s commonly supported. I imagine others will start popping up, but Ubuntu is more or less the reference o/s and most people just go with that. There are companies like Concurrent RT which produce something different than Ubuntu (theirs is for soft realtime). Anyone doing so prior to L4T R35.x would have quite a task on their hands; those with other o/s within R35.x would not find it as difficult, but there would certainly be some challenges. It isn’t until R36.x that you will find the more extreme challenges softened (porting an o/s is not easy considering you must port the applications too, but there are differing degrees of difficulty).
I don’t know if there is much out there which differs for the AGX industrial or not, but the reality is that you probably need to go to Orin to improve that even though there isn’t a lot already ported for Orin in R36.x. Thor will be coming out soon, and my guess is this will be the first time a number of different o/s will start showing up. Other than that you will find a number of scattered projects.