Connect Your External Graphics Card to Jetson AGX Xavier

It is an instruction on how to use the PCI-e(Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) slot on Jetson AGX Xavier to connect your external Nvidia GPU

Prerequisites:

• The JetPack version must be newer than JetPack 5.0
  
• Supported GPUs please refer to this link: Nvidia Driver Info Pages
  
• When setting up hardware connections, it's important to ensure the proper power supply for your GPU by using appropriate PCI-e power cables and an external power source. Connect your GPU securely to the designated PCI-e slot on the Jetson AGX Xavier. Currently, the HDMI cable should be connected to the Xavier, not the GPU.

Install the Display Driver:

The Nvidia Linux-Aarch64 Display Drivers are suitable for AGX Xavier. Let's install the nvidia-driver-535 for an example.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install nvidia-driver-535 nvidia-dkms-535

During the installation, you may see the error message:

dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/libnvidia-gl-535_535.86.0
5-0ubuntu0.20.04.2_arm64.deb (--unpack):
 trying to overwrite '/usr/share/glvnd/egl_vendor.d/10_nvidia.json', which is al
so in package nvidia-l4t-3d-core 35.2.1-20230124153320
dpkg-deb: error: paste subprocess was killed by signal (Broken pipe)

The errors you're seeing are due to dpkg (Debian package management system) trying to install a package that contains files that are already provided by another installed package. In this specific case, you're trying to install Nvidia packages and they conflict with the already installed nvidia-l4t-* packages. To resolve this, you can force dpkg to overwrite the conflicting files.

sudo dpkg -i --force-overwrite /var/cache/apt/archives/libnvidia-compute-535_535.86.05-0ubuntu0.20.04.2_arm64.deb
sudo dpkg -i --force-overwrite /var/cache/apt/archives/libnvidia-common-535*.deb
sudo dpkg -i --force-overwrite /var/cache/apt/archives/libnvidia-gl-535_535.86.05-0ubuntu0.20.04.2_arm64.deb
sudo dpkg -i --force-overwrite /var/cache/apt/archives/libnvidia-extra-535_535.86.05-0ubuntu0.20.04.2_arm64.deb
sudo dpkg -i --force-overwrite /var/cache/apt/archives/nvidia-utils-535_535.86.05-0ubuntu0.20.04.2_arm64.deb

Then you can try to fix the broken dependencies and resume the installation:

sudo apt --fix-broken install

Congratulations! You have the display driver installed.

After the Installation:

Please do a full system reboot. Move the HDMI connection from Xavier to your GPU. After the reboot, the original integrated GPU on Xavier will be set aside and the new GPU will kick in.

You may use this command to check the running status of your GPU:

nvidia-smi

Enjoy!