points by alex43578 3 days ago | 0 comments
Do they also need to support MacOS, Chrome OS, and FreeBSD? They made these laptops to work with Windows. It’s not on them to ensure compatibility with anything more than they were marketed for.
[–] bigyabai 3 days ago
[–] alex43578 3 days ago
The article says "A real fix depends on Nvidia, specifically on porting the platform controller’s power management logic into its Linux driver, which would effectively turn the laptop into a portable version of the DGX Spark."
My point is that's not Nvidia's responsibility. The article itself admits the laptop "ships with Windows on ARM", so support for another OS shouldn't be expected, even if NVIDIA supports other platforms and other product lines differently.
[–] bigyabai 3 days ago
These aren't "other product lines" though. They are RTX and Spark SOC products that do support Linux as a first-class citizen with all of their hardware. The RTX Spark is the outlier, and the breakage is not on the GPU product, but the SOC devicetree drivers. This is only a problem because Nvidia avoided standard Windows power management a-la ACPI/UEFI, and has to port the remainder to Linux by hand. Non-laptop products like the DGX Spark support this via UEFI natively.
There are OEMs that refuse this responsibility. If that's the vindication you wanted, there you go. This specific issue is not a catastrophic oversight though.
They basically do. ChromeOS runs a Linux kernel, so the userland has everything it needs to run CUDA. FreeBSD is a first-class target for Nvidia drivers, and macOS used to be supported too but stopped signing Nvidia code. Nevertheless, AArch64 is still supported for CUDA et. al..
It is up to Nvidia to support whatever platforms they want users to be on. In their case, it means supporting many OSes.