NetBSD on the Nvidia Jetson TK1

http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/netbsd_on_the_nvidia_jetson

by fcambus • 11 years ago

53 15 11 years ago

blog.netbsd.org

fit2rule• 11 years ago

I love these ARM based systems that are available today - so much fun in such a small package.

I only wish they'd come with more RAM, or at least some way to upgrade the RAM .. I'm pretty spoiled with the 32gigs of RAM I've become accustomed to in my workstations, alas.

Anyone know of a multi-core ARM-based system with decent performance and 8 - 16gigs of RAM possibility? I'd love to have such a machine to hack with ..

david-given• 11 years ago

Until ARM64 becomes mainstream, unlikely --- ARMs are 32 bit devices and are limited to 4GB total. I don't know what the NetBSD userspace layout is but the largest process is probably going to be 2GB or 3GB.

(FWIW, I was looking at the writeup and thinking: finally, an ARM dev board with a decent amount of memory!)

dezgeg2• 11 years ago

The LPAE extension increases the maximal possible amount of physical memory up to 1TB (40 bits).

sprash2• 11 years ago

The ARM architecture supports LPAE with up to 40 bits. So the memory cap is at 1024 GB. But I never came across a device utilizing LPAE.

Since there are also ways to get around the 4GB per process cap on 32Bit systems I never understood the craze for 64 bit systems. Most of the time 64 bit makes things slower (e.g. that is why the x32 linux abi exists) and leads to more power consumption.

paulmd• 11 years ago

Not only a decent amount of memory, but a very powerful GPU for its category (192 Kepler cores supporting CUDA compute) and a lot of features and expandability (SATA, USB 3.0, 1GigE, mPCI-e, etc). The primary target market is a dev board for automotive applications like dashboard rendering, machine vision for things like backup warnings, etc. But it's an extremely powerful machine for its size/power and has many potential applications for embedded processing.

It's been out for a couple years now, and what I'm really waiting for is an updated version with the new Tegra X1 SoC! Where's my Jetson TX1 NVIDIA?

modeless2• 11 years ago

NVIDIA does have a 64-bit ARM chip in products today; the Tegra X1. Unfortunately they don't seem to have a dev kit available for it. It's a really interesting design too, a completely custom core that can use hardware or software translation of ARM instructions to its own internal instruction set, like Transmeta. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver

It's speculated that NVIDIA wanted it to support both ARM and x86, but was unable to license x86 from Intel.

krylon2• 11 years ago

Until ARM64 becomes mainstream, unlikely

Correct my, if I am wrong, but I though the current generations of the iPhone/iPad run on ARM64... It does not get much more mainstream than that.

justizin• 11 years ago

IIRC, Facebook uses (or used) Tilera machines for memcache nodes, they seem to be focused on network applications now.

NetBSD on the Nvidia Jetson TK1

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