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Comment by joelthelion | Hacker News Reader

"Nvidia dgx os", ugh. It would be a lot more enticing if that thing could run stock Linux.

It's just Ubuntu with precanned Nvidia software, otherwise it's a "normal" UEFI + ACPI booting machine, just like any x86 desktop. People have already installed NixOS and Fedora 43, and you can even go ahead and then install CUDA and it will work, too. (You might be able to forgo the nvidia modules and run upstream Mesa+NVK, even.) It's very different from Jetson and much more like a normal x86 desktop.

The kernel is patched (and maintained by Canonical, not Nvidia) but the patches hanging off their 6.17-next branch didn't look outrageous to me. The main hitch right now is that upstream doesn't have a Realtek r8127 driver for the ethernet controller. There were also some mediatek-related patches that were probably relevant as they designed the CPU die.

Overall it feels close to full upstream support (to be clear: you CAN boot this system with a fully upstream kernel, today). And booting with UEFI means you can just use the nvidia patches on $YOUR_FAVORITE_DISTRO and reboot, no need to fiddle with or inject the proper device trees or whatever.

I got burned more than once with Nvidia not providing kernel updates straight after release...

That was also my experience with their Jetson series [1], but my understanding is that these DGX kernels are not maintained by Nvidia but by Canonical, so they operate directly out of their package repos and on Canonicals' release and support schedule (e.g. 24.04 supported until 2029.) You can already get 6.14 from the package repos, and 6.17 can be built from source and is regularly updated if you follow the Git repositories. It's also not like the system is unusable without patches, and I suspect most will go upstream.

Based on my experience it feels quite different and much closer to a normal x86 machine, probably intentional. Maybe it helped that Nvidia did not design the full CPU complex, Mediatek did that.

[1] They even claim that Thor is now fully SBSA compliant (Xavier had UEFI, Orin had better UEFI, and now this) -- which would imply it has full UEFI + ACPI like the Spark. But when I looked at the kernel in their Thor L4T release, it looked like it was still loaded with Jetson-specific SOC drivers on top of a heavy fork of the PREEMPT_RT patch series for Linux 6.8; I did not look too hard, but it still didn't seem ideal. Maybe you can probably boot a "normal" OS missing most of the actual Jetson-specific peripherals, I guess.

Wait, x86? you mean arm64?

It's a bit ambiguous but I can't edit now, sorry. What I meant to say was that it boots using the same mechanism as x86 machines that you are familiar with, not that it is an x86 machine itself.

Thanks! So, then, they are terrible at marketing it, at least for people like me.

DGXOS is a customized Ubuntu Noble!

/etc/os-release:

  PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS"
  NAME="Ubuntu"
  VERSION_ID="24.04"
  VERSION="24.04.3 LTS (Noble Numbat)"
  VERSION_CODENAME=noble
  ID=ubuntu
  ID_LIKE=debian
  HOME_URL="https://www.ubuntu.com/"
  SUPPORT_URL="https://help.ubuntu.com/"
  BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/"
  PRIVACY_POLICY_URL="https://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies/privacy-policy"
  UBUNTU_CODENAME=noble
  LOGO=ubuntu-logo

and /etc/dgx-release:

  DGX_NAME="DGX Spark"
  DGX_PRETTY_NAME="NVIDIA DGX Spark"
  DGX_SWBUILD_DATE="2025-09-10-13-50-03"
  DGX_SWBUILD_VERSION="7.2.3"
  DGX_COMMIT_ID="833b4a7"
  DGX_PLATFORM="DGX Server for KVM"
  DGX_SERIAL_NUMBER="Not Specified"

While other Linux distros were already reported to work, some tools provide by Nvidia won't work with Fedora or NixOS. Not yet!

I couldn't get Nvidia AI Workbench to start on Neon KDE after changing to DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu in /etc/lsb-release. Neon is based on Ubuntu Noble too.

I assume the driver code just isn't in mainline linux and installing the correct toolchain isn't always easy. Having it turnkey available is nice and fundamentally new hardware just isn't going to have day 1 linux support.

You're free to lift the kernel and any drivers/libraries and run them on your distribution of choice, it'll just be hacky.

Yeah that's a bummer. They do the same for all their boards like the Jetson Nano.

it's basically just linux with a custom kernel and cuda preinstalled

What would be the advantages, exactly?

Guess I have my answer.

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