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Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

Woah, this is amazing. I’ve been looking for an ARM Linux machine for a while and ended up about to get M2 Pros in a rack running Asahi. It has been near impossible to get a Snapdragon Elite machine. The IdeaCentre or whatever is 2x the cost / performance and as far as I know is poorly supported.

This changes the game. I’d rather use native Linux than Asahi (though the latter is amazing).

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Get a DGX spark.

Ships with aarch64 Ubuntu 24.04.

Tons of cores and RAM.

Very quiet and small

UEFI bootloader - I installed Ubuntu 25.10 and ESXi arm edition just by booting the ISO

usb-c power input (kinda cool)

Insane connectx 200GbE RoCE networking

10GbE Ethernet

Oh and an nvidia gpu with cuda and access to 128GB of unified memory

It would be perfect if it had some kind of BMC or IPMI/redfish and an exposed PCIE slot. But this thing is an awesome arm64 workstation no doubt.

May try to install to a USB drive and hang another gpu off the nvme port just to see what happens

Is it easy to buy a DGX Spark?

My microcenter has nvidia OEM flavor in stock. There are also flavors from all the other OEMs that differ slightly on cooling but mainly on chassis design.

This might sound silly question, but those of you who have digits/spark machine, has anyone run Fedora on it? I kind of ran away from Ubuntu back to Fedora because reasons. Bonus question, far-fetched, steam and games with FEX?

Fedora boots ootb

Steam gaming with FEX is possible on the DGX Spark. The GPU is approximately a mobile 5070 with much less memory bandwidth. The CPU cores are relatively weak, especially after the instruction set translation overhead. There's a lot of stuff that's playable, but the performance is laughably bad for a $4000 machine.

FEX wouldn't affect GPU side of things though. Also, it's a machine that fits into one and a half hand. I'd call it alright for what it is actually in the context of the size.

FEX is relevant to real use cases because a lot of things that would be GPU-limited on an x86 machine can become CPU-limited when running on DGX Spark. The overhead of x86 to ARM translation, plus the low performance of the ARM cores, plus the overhead of WINE all add up to Windows games running on DGX Spark sometimes being CPU-limited and under-utilizing the GPU.

It seems incredible but uhm, way out of my mitteleuropaishe budget

Oh that's a good shout. A friend did get one of these so I'll go take a look at it and see what it's like.

And, any other options or recommendations if I don't need the huge GPU?

Seems like the middle ground between SBCs and huge servers is a bit underserved in ARM...

Does this actually translate into any kind of probability of a manufacturer making a device with this chip?

I don't think this changes the game as much as you think.

AFAIU, the biggest challenge of running Linux on ARM machines is supporting the devicetree of each machine. After all, there is mainline kernel support for previous Qualcomm chips, yet very few machines with those chips can actually run Linux distros.

So this is good news, but in practical terms it's just a marketing piece.

How is Asahi not native?

Presumably OP meant a Linux distro using a normal upstream kernel?

The drivers, while impressively reverse-engineered, are basically alpha-quality by Linux standards. Even well-studied M1 machines will have spotty support in comparison to what an OEM can provide officially.

Those that are implemented have been very reliable in my experience, I think that labeling them “alpha-quality by Linux standards” is a ridiculous claim

Then you need an Intel or AMD laptop as a frame of reference. M1 is implemented as-is with much of the silicon's onboard accelerators entirely dark. Hardware accelerated video encode/decode is a lost cause, Thunderbolt will likely never happen, NEON is your fastest SIMD accelerator and cpuidle is still not really figured out.

Those are all perfectly acceptable limitations for a POC. And the GPU drivers are particularly well-made. But it doesn't really come close to how seriously AMD and Intel take Linux.

There's a big difference between saying that many of the drivers are missing entirely, and saying that the drivers that exist are alpha-quality.

my dude no. https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m1/#tab...

even in the m1 there are 4 WIP in the support table, 2 TBA and 10 non mainline boxes for the M1 pro

> Those that are implemented

+1. Been running Asahi Linux for half a year now. Everything that's advertized as working is working great.

Asahi is also still a platform with a huge pile of out of tree patches on top because the platform itself is pretty unusual, requiring for example, a 16K page size kernel which is unlike pretty much every other arm Linux platform.

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