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I think the Jetson TK1 from NVIDIA can run mainline Linux with most of the devices working.

I actually have one of those, but never investigated the bootloader situation for that platform.

And to get good use out of the GPU (one of the main selling points for this platform), you'll want to use the Nvidia proprietary driver.

The K1 chip has a blob-free boot (unlike the newer chips AFAIK) except for the USB-based flash programming / recovery mode, so for the initial installation you'd need to manually flash the eMMC somehow if you don't want to run any proprietary code.

And yes, CUDA isn't supported by the open drivers. Other than that, I've heard Nouveau works relatively well. Though I'm not still sure if the open source graphics community has figured out a way to get stacks like Xorg or Wayland/Weston running without hacking the source on architectures where rendering and scanout are done by different DRM devices.

NVIDIA has made it possible to run the Jetson TK1 under Nouveau with hardware accelerated graphics (Weston/Wayland or X).

https://github.com/NVIDIA/tegra-nouveau-rootfs

Using a completely open stack on the TK1, from u-boot to kernel (except for the USB firmware), I can run ARM virtual machines with QEMU/KVM.

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