Nvidia Jetson Nano + Sentiments of this community

[Jobb]

Hello,

I've been surfing through the FreeBSD forums and resources for quite some time now and I have couple of questions. But first, few things about me

1. I've been with Linux since a very long time and I'm comfortable with it. It has been solid for me without many issues. (Main laptop is running Arch and secondary laptop is running Gentoo. My servers run CentOS). I've tried FreeBSD on a virtual machine yesterday for the first time.
2. I don't really care if I run systemd or Open-RC or some other init system.
3. I'm waiting for my Nvidia Jetson Nano and in the mean time looking for a distro (other than Debian and distros based on it) to run on it. I came across this-thread and been wondering about FreeBSD as an option.

My Questions

1. With reference to the pi-thread-in-feedback-section, ucomp suddenly mentioned "stable professional FreeBSD-Server"; whereas I see no mention of Pi to be used as a server (maybe OP uses Pi as a home server, but it wasn't clear from that first post)

Is that how almost everyone here sees FreeBSD? OS to power mostly servers; OR does Tier 1 support equate to that class of stability(to be able to run and support production servers). I disagree with argument presented by ucomp but that's out of the scope of my thread.

2. Can my Jetson Nano run on FreeBSD without issues (Assuming Nvidia rep mentioned what he was told to say)? I come under the "enthusiast" category and would like to try some of these-jetson-projects. That would be my use case.

 

[SirDice]

Tier 1 status is with regards to support on the base OS, what you do with it is what defines it being a desktop or a server. How you use it has nothing to do with the tier status.

Committer's Guide

Introductory information for FreeBSD committers

www.freebsd.org

 

[ucomp]

.... I disagree with argument presented by ucomp ...

impudence! ..
... just kidding..

OR does Tier 1 support equate to that class of stability(to be able to run and support production servers).

yes, e.g. the Arm64 initial reference - platform is a server-CPU and I guess it will not change to RPI or another "home"- device :

arm64 - FreeBSD Wiki

...(Assuming Nvidia rep mentioned what he was told to say)...

what was he told ??

... by the way
through all this Tier 1 - chatter nothing develops.
just take your Jetson Nano and try to test/contribute, regardless of Tier X status.

 

[SirDice]

just take your Jetson Nano and try to test/contribute, regardless of Tier X status.

To add to that, there's a common misconception only approved developers can contribute. That's not the case for FreeBSD, anyone can make suggestions, provide patches or help out in some way. The only "registration" that's required is for https://bugs.freebsd.org or one or more mailing lists. But anyone can register and thus contribute.

 

[Jobb]

what was he told ??

... by the way
through all this Tier 1 - chatter nothing develops.
just take your Jetson Nano and try to test/contribute, regardless of Tier X status.

I would like to tell the default is not support FreeBSD and it could be a lot of work to migrate to it. - Nvidia rep in that thread.

I just meant that, Nvidia would only support the OS which you can download from their website for Jetson Nano and {maybe} that rep was just being diplomatic when he said "it could be a lot of work to migrate it" (So that you don't blame Nvidia in any way if you do use FreeBSD and face major/minor issues)

Tier status doesn't deter me; from testing and trying it at the very least.

To add to that, there's a common misconception only approved developers can contribute. That's not the case for FreeBSD, anyone can make suggestions, provide patches or help out in some way. The only "registration" that's required is for https://bugs.freebsd.org or one or more mailing lists. But anyone can register and thus contribute.

I'm happy to contribute once its here. At the very least, I can inform about the bugs or issues I'm facing.

 

[ucomp]

.... Nvidia rep in that thread...
I'm happy to contribute once its here. ....

now you're the jetson nano rep in this thread here
--
I`m not aware of your experiences/skills with SBCs
but some hints(without any guarantee because I have no jetson nano) :

the 1st "bug" you will probably encounter ist that you won't get HDMI-output ..
since the baudrate of jetson nano is standard 115200n8 you should be fine with an standard USB-> UART adaptor to access the jetson via minicom . You can also use another SBC(e.g. RPI) to access UART via pins.
the next "bug" will possibly "hang on boot".... something like 'loader.efi, no such file...blabla..`
Possibly you could have success via netboot PXE....
but that are details discussed in the Arm mailing list, which you should subscribe now ( for an estimation of what's going on )...
afaik the latest bootable images will be found in 13 current : https://www.freebsd.org/where.html
or in snapshots . there's a git mirror of src , most devs don't waste their time in forums, they 'waste' it in src