The last two years or so I’ve been working with NVIDIA on general distro support including UEFI and ACPI for their Jetson Xavier platforms. Their Xavier platform, except a few quirks, are mostly SystemReady-ES compliant, so having a SBBR compliant firmware goes quite some way to having a widely available, relatively affordable, platform that “just works” for the arm ecosystem. I was very excited to finally have NVIDIA finally release the first version in March this year. This firmware is a standard UEFI firmware based on the open source TianoCore/EDK2 reference firmware, it allows booting in either ACPI or Device-Tree mode and supports all the basic things needed. The ACPI mode is not as fully featured as the Device-Tree mode as yet. In ACPI you get compute (cpu/memory/virt etc), PCIe, USB, network, which is just fine if you’re just looking for standard server or for testing a SystemReady system but there’s no display or accelerator support as yet. The Device-Tree mode is more feature full but both work pretty well with upstream kernels and NVIDIA are improving and upstreaming more things regularly.
For flashing with the latest Fedora releases you’ll want the Linux for Tegra (L4T) R32.6.1 release and the latest UEFI firmware (1.1.2 ATM). The R32.6.1 release fixes issues with python3.9 and later so you’ll need that for Fedora. The following will extract everything into a directory called Linux_for_Tegra. Note the release for Xavier is different to the L4T for the TX1/TX2 series of devices such as the nano.
$ tar xvf Jetson_Linux_R32.6.1_aarch64.tbz2 $ tar xvf nvidia-l4t-jetson-uefi-R32.6.1-20211119125725.tbz2 $ cd Linux_for_Tegra
To flash either the Xavier AGX or NX you need to put them into recovery mode and connect a USB cable, USB-C for AGX or micro-USB for NX. Once you’re in recovery mode you can flash them.
For the Xavier AGX:
$ lsusb | grep -i NV Bus 001 Device 086: ID 0955:7019 NVIDIA Corp. APX $ sudo ./flash.sh jetson-xavier-uefi-min external
For the Xavier NX:
$ lsusb | grep -i NV Bus 001 Device 089: ID 0955:7e19 NVIDIA Corp. APX $ sudo ./flash.sh jetson-xavier-nx-uefi-acpi internal
There will be a bunch of output and it will eventually return to the prompt and reset the device. You can now install Fedora on the device. You can use any of the pre-canned aarch64 image or traditional installer available from the fedora website. When running in ACPI mode you don’t get display output so you’ll need to use a serial console, in both ACPI and Device-Tree mode there’s not currently support for accelerated GPU graphics/AI/ML support. If you want to be able to easily switch between ACPI/Device-Tree modes you’ll want to install the dracut-config-generic package to have a generic initrd to make it easy to reboot between both modes.