Arch Linux ARM Booted on ASUS ProArt P16 With NVIDIA RTX Spark, Matching Windows in Tests

An Arch Linux package maintainer who goes by Josie has adapted Arch Linux ARM, a separate project that ports Arch packages to ARM processors, for the ASUS ProArt P16 H7607BA-SE033W laptop. The machine is built on NVIDIA's RTX Spark platform with a 20-core N1X processor, 128 GB of RAM, 6,144 CUDA cores and a 2 TB SSD. Official support for it exists only for Windows, so the author published the build scripts and patches openly. The setup lets the laptop run open-weight language models locally without Windows or a Microsoft account.

What was done

The author drew on NVIDIA's kernel work for Ubuntu, fixed the ACPI override allocation and framebuffer mapping needed to get a console, and generated ACPI overrides from the laptop's own tables. The keyboard needed a patched hid-asus driver, and audio needed its own machine driver. Everything was packaged into a bootable USB and an extended Archinstall 4.5 installer. The display runs at 3840 × 2400 and 120 Hz.

Performance

In 7-Zip 26.04 tests, single-thread results were nearly identical to published Windows results for the HP OmniBook Ultra 16, which has the same processor: −1.2% in compression and −0.8% in decompression. With all 20 threads, Linux was 5.0% faster at compression and 2.7% faster at decompression. The author notes that the HP review does not state its 7-Zip version or dictionary size.

Memory and language model

Under Linux, both system RAM and CUDA report 116.0 GiB from one physical pool. Windows splits memory into separate regions; in Frandroid's Windows test, CUDA's total was 109.7 GiB.

The author ran an NVIDIA Qwen model through vLLM, allocating nearly 90 GiB to the model and KV cache. Generation speed was 30.9 tokens per second, against 29.4 and 31.4 in Frandroid's Windows tests. The author stresses that the comparison does not isolate the effect of the operating system. In a ten-minute load test, all 150 answers passed the checks.