I am currently using a NVIDIA DGX Spark system. It is currently running Ubuntu 24.04, but I need to use ARC-OTA (Aerial Research Cloud - Over-The-Air) for my research in wireless communications and signal processing.
The issue is that SDK Manager (v2.4.0) and ARC-OTA do not seem to officially support Ubuntu 24.04 yet, leading to “Failed to load the configuration file” errors in the CLI and UI issues. Therefore, I have decided to downgrade the OS to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
I have a few questions regarding this process:
Official Recovery Image: Is there a specific DGX OS 6 (based on Ubuntu 22.04) recovery image I should use for the DGX Spark? If so, where is the best place to download the latest verified version?
Brick Concerns: Are there any specific hardware-level precautions (e.g., BMC/IPMI settings or RAID configurations) I should be aware of to avoid “bricking” the system during a clean install?
Driver Restoration: After a clean install of Ubuntu 22.04, will the standard SDK Manager installation be enough to restore all DGX-specific drivers and optimizations?
Any advice or official documentation links for a safe downgrade process would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for your suggestion about using a virtual machine with GPU passthrough!
I have one question: if we run Ubuntu 22.04 in a virtual machine, would this significantly affect the performance of the DGX Spark? I am particularly concerned about potential performance degradation compared to running everything directly on the host system.
In addition, since we plan to conduct communication research using ARC-OTA, I would like to ask whether running it inside a virtual machine could introduce any performance bottlenecks that might impact our experiments.
Absolutely, running the virtualisation environment is never free from a computational perspective. Yet, there is a very good chance that performance of the final setup will not be affected dramatically, as the DGX Spark can deliver significant computational power. To start you can compare the system requirements of your lab environment with the system specs. And, if there is room of experimenting, give your hypervisor (or container) of choice a test run.
This should cost you less than a system downgrade, time wise.
I understand your point, and it seems like a very reasonable and convincing suggestion. However, wouldn’t downgrading the OS be a more straightforward option? As far as I know, earlier DGX Spark systems were running on Ubuntu 22.04. Would downgrading be complicated or potentially risky?
Well, NVIDIA support for DGX Spark is evolving; we are all early adopters, and we may need, sooner or later, to upgrade our systems in order to correct system behaviours, or improve hardware support. In turn firmware upgrades typically rely upon a reference software environment, which is already evolving. Upgrading means tapping into the contributions coming from the engineering, as per usual.
Conversely, downgrading would leave you stuck in a frozen state, assuming re-imaging the Spark is pain free and you have access to the older DGX OS image (which is something I don’t have).
DGX Spark OS currently supports 24.04. As discussed in other threads, you are free to experiment with any OS (including downgrade to 22.04), however it’ll be an unsupported configuration. If you need support with Hardware for RMA, we may require you to reimage it back to a supported OS, as our triage tools are tested only for supported configurations.
Per Ubuntu release cycle | Ubuntu, 22.04 LTS will EOL in 2027 (about a year away), you may want to reach out to ARC-OTA and see what their roadmap is? This maybe more efficient path forward than downgrading and risk missing future software updates, security patches and performance gains.
At this stage, I am not planning to conduct full-scale research yet. My immediate goal is simply to run ARC-OTA on the DGX Spark and become familiar with the workflow and environment.
In that case, I am wondering whether running ARC-OTA inside a Docker container based on Ubuntu 22.04 would be a reasonable approach, while keeping the host system on the officially supported Ubuntu 24.04.
Additionally, I would like to ask whether installing ARC-OTA is only possible through SDK Manager, or if there are alternative installation methods available.