We had successfully installed Ubuntu 14.04 on the Apalis TK1 using the image Apalis-TK1_LXDE-Image 2.8b1.64 20171229 and following the guide in Installing NVIDIA JetPack with L4T on Apalis TK1
The latest image of Linux for Tegra (r21.6) is based on Ubuntu 14.04. We were wondering if it’s possible to install a version of Ubuntu 16.04 on the Apalis TK1. Are you aware of any customers that has achieved this? Is this something we depend on NVIDIA to do it? can we expect an update to support Ubuntu 16.04 on the Tegra TK1? what are the alternatives?
The reason we would prefer Ubuntu 16.04 as opposed to any other distribution is that we need to integrate in our platform a 3rd party software, from a client, which is running on Ubuntu 16.04. While we could work with Ubuntu 14.04, knowing the end of life of this version will be April of 2019 we will prefer a more recent version.
Whether or not one may run different Linux distributions mainly has to do with your requirements. If you do need NVIDIA’s proprietary hardware accelerated graphics/multimedia stack (e.g. also for running CUDA) you are more or less dependent on their binary only drivers. Supposedly NVIDIA’s latest Linux for Tegra (L4T R21.6) which is only fully tested/supported on Ubuntu ARM 14.04 may contain an Xorg driver also compatible with Xorg 1.18 which is what Ubuntu ARM 16.04 is using. However last I heard from NVIDIA that this has not been fully validated & verified and is therefore not really advertised anywhere. So far I also don’t think anybody at Toradex has tried it. If however you are fine with running fully open-source nouveau graphics (hardware accelerated OpenGL aka 3D but so far without any hardware accelerated multimedia) you may stick to the mainline Linux kernel and stock distribution drivers.
To answer your questions:
Are you aware of any customers that has achieved this?
No.
Is this something we depend on NVIDIA to do it?
Yes, if you require their fully hardware accelerated graphics/multimedia stack (e.g. for CUDA as well).
Can we expect an update to support Ubuntu 16.04 on the Tegra TK1?
I don’t think so. But you may of course directly ask NVIDIA about it.
what are the alternatives?
As mentioned above one may run mainline Linux kernel with nouveau graphics as well.
Thanks for your promptly response, it was really helpful. We will stay with Ubuntu 14.04 as we will be implementing some algorithms using CUDA. But it’s good to know of the alternative of using nouveau for graphics
For other products we will develop in the future the likeliness is that we will be using newer distributions of Ubuntu as well. We are looking forward to see if the future Apalis iMX8 will support it