Is it possible to configure DRIVE Thor as "headless" or "computing-only"?

Autonomous Vehicles DRIVE AGX Thor DRIVE AGX Thor General
1

Please provide the following info (tick the boxes after creating this topic):

Software Version
DRIVE OS 7.0.3
other

Target Operating System
Linux
QNX
other

Hardware Platform
DRIVE AGX Thor Developer Kit (940-63960-0010-000)
DRIVE AGX Thor Developer Kit (940-63960-0012-000)
other

Host Machine Version
native Ubuntu Linux 24.04 Host installed with DRIVE OS Docker Containers
other

Issue Description

Hello,

Is it possible to configure DRIVE Thor as “headless or computing-only”?
If it is possible, please guide me to any helpful resources.

I searched for “headless” and “computing-only” in “NVIDIA DriveOS 7.0 Linux Installation Guide”, but I was not able to find any clue, while there are some information for regular Linux PCs and Jetson on the Internet and on NVIDIA’s site.

My application uses DRIVE Thor only for computing works and it doesn’t need any GUI or text console.
Access through ssh or the serial interface will do for operating it.

I want to have a “headless or computing-only” configuration to achieve higher “amount-of-work per power-consumption” ratio.

I think “display feature” consumes the following GPU resources:

  • Memory area for frame buffers
  • Memory bandwidth for scanning frame buffers at the refreshing rate
  • Power for driving display interfaces
  • Graphics/CUDA pipeline
    • Drawing interferes with computation by CUDA because they share the same pipeline.

If I can have a “headless or computing-only” configuration, I would be able to dedicate all of the resources only for computing works and achieve higher “amout-of-work per power-consumption” rate.

Your help will be greatly appreciated.

5

Dear @masaki.nishikawa2 ,
How about killing gdm and access the target via ssh session?

6

Dear SivaRamaKrishnaNV,

Thank you for your reply.

> How about killing gdm and access the target via ssh session?

I’m afraid that just killing the display manager is not enough.

I think that Linux still recognizes the GPU as a display device, allocates frame buffers, have the display hardware scan the buffer and prints system messages on the text console.
I want to prohibit Linux from recognizing the GPU as a display device so that all of the GPU resources are used only for CUDA applications.

For NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin, NVIDIA explains “Initial setup in a headless configuration” on the following official page, but it raises 2 questions.

  • Which is correct?
    • The procedure configures Jetson AGX Orin as a “headless” system.
    • This is just a procedure to setup Jetson AGX Orin without using a display monitor.
  • Is there similar procedure for NVIDIA DRIVE Thor?

Some web-sites tell that I need to add some kernel boot options (like “fbcon=off” or “console=off”) to configure a headless system with general Linux , but I wonder whether it can be applied to DRIVE Thor.

The following NVIDIA document has a chapter titled “6.6. Compute-only (Headless) and Desktop-only (no Compute) Installation”.
Of course, this document is not for DRIVE Thor.

7

This is correct.

We don’t have any method to support this. All PCT have included display and enabled by default.

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