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Comment by AlexeyBrin | Hacker News Reader

The price is interesting. What I don't like about these devices is that they are supported for a few years and after you are on your on. I have the original Jetson Nano and they stopped providing any updates for it, if you can use it without an internet connection it will work just fine for years.

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Yup and trying to hack your OG jetson Nano to a later linux is very hard due to proprietary linux / nvidia firmware/drivers. Its not a matter of your are on your own for OS upgrades, it straight up wont even be able to use the GPU for cuda. Pretty annoying.

Apparently they differentiate between their regular modules and the dev kits: The Jetson Nano you mentioned is supported until 2027, but their dev kit is EOL.

For the Jetson Orin Nano the module is supported until 2032, but the dev kit likely not.

Source: https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/lifecycle

I think the latest Orin series supports both UEFI and there is "Bring Your Own Kernel" support for more recent releases[1], but you still need to apply the patches. Also, the Tegra GPU driver "nvgpu" has been open source in this form for quite some time in the Linux4Tegra tree, but I don't see it in the patch list. So, it's still a bit of a mixed bag, I think. But UEFI and 6.x kernel support is at least an improvement...

[1] https://docs.nvidia.com/jetson/archives/r36.3/DeveloperGuide...

Well, that's how embedded computers are meant to be used, just like everything before the Internet.

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