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