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Hopefully, the OS support isn't as awful as the Jetson platforms usually are. Unless they change, you'll get 1 or 2 major kernel updates ever and have to do bizarre stuff like install a 6 year old Ubuntu on your x86 PC to run the utility to flash the OS.

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The community likely will make instructions for installing mainstream Linux distributions on it.

Doesn't really help though if it requires an nvidia kernel.

The Linux kernel license requires Nvidia to disclose their Linux kernel sources and Nvidia open sourced their kernel driver.

That said, you can probably boot a Debian or Gentoo system using the Nvidia provided kernel if need be.

It always has been the userspace of the Jetsons which was closed source and tied to Nvidia's custom kernel. I have not heard from people running Jetpack on a different userland than the one provided by Nvidia. Companies/Labs that update the OS don't care about CUDA, Nvidia contributes to Mesa support of the Jetsons and some only need a bit more GPU power than a RasPi.

The official Linux kernel driver for Blackwell is GPL/MIT licensed: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-transitions-fully-t...

Keep in mind that a kernel module != driver. It's just doing initialization and passing data to/from the driver, which is closed source and in user space.

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