JetPack SDK

Jetson Linux

NVIDIA Jetson Linux 36.4 provides the Linux Kernel 5.15, UEFI based bootloader, Ubuntu 22.04 based root file system, NVIDIA drivers, necessary firmwares, toolchain and more.

JetPack 6.1 includes Jetson Linux 36.4 with following highlights:
(Please refer to release notes for additional details)

• Upgraded compute stack with CUDA 12.6, TensorRT 10.3, cuDNN 9.3, VPI 3.2. DLA 3.1 and DLFW 24.0
• Camera
  • Enhanced Argus library, reducing CPU utilization by up to 40%
• Security
  • Support for Firmware-based Trusted Platform Module (fTPM) on the Orin platform. Refer to the security page for all security features.
• Graphics
  • Upgraded Weston (a reference implementation of a Wayland compositor) to version 13.0.
• Software support for the PCN 211361 and fixes for various security vulnerabilities.

Jetson Platform Services

Jetson Platform Services is a collection of pre-built and cloud-native software services and reference workflows to accelerate AI applications on Jetson. These services are modular, API-driven and can be quickly configured to build Generative AI and other edge applications. There are 15+ services from AI services to system services. The services include:

• AI Perception Service using DeepStream
• AI Inference Service for Visual Language Model (VLM)
• AI Analytics - to process metadata to time-series insights
• Sensor Management and Storage with VST
• Redis Message Bus
• API and IoT Gateway

To demonstrate the capabilities of these services, following reference workflows are included:

• AI-NVR - complete workflow for AI-based Network video recorder
• Generative AI workflow for alerting and visual chat
• Generative AI workflow for zero-shot detection.

Note: Jetson Platform Services will be available soon.

Linux Distros on Jetson

JetPack includes Jetson Linux out of the box, but Jetson ecosystem partners offer various Linux based Distros on Jetson. They include:

Canonical Ubuntu: Ubuntu 22.04 offered by Canonical. Please refer to this webinar to learn more about Canonical offering on Jetson.

Red Hat : Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 offered by Red Hat

Windriver Linux: Commercial embedded Linux OS from Windriver.

SUSE: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) offered by SUSE.

RedHawk: Real Time Linux OS from Concurrent Real-Time for mission critical hard real time applications.

Yocto based distros: Various Yocto based distros and services leveraging meta-tegra are offered by ecosystem partners like Balena, Foundries.io & TimeSys.

TensorRT

TensorRT is a high performance deep learning inference runtime for image classification, segmentation, and object detection neural networks. TensorRT is built on CUDA, NVIDIA’s parallel programming model, and enables you to optimize inference for all deep learning frameworks. It includes a deep learning inference optimizer and runtime that delivers low latency and high-throughput for deep learning inference applications.

JetPack 6.1 includes TensorRT 10.3.0

DLA

NVIDIA DLA hardware is a fixed-function accelerator engine targeted for deep learning operations. It’s designed to do full hardware acceleration of convolutional neural networks, supporting various layers such as convolution, deconvolution, fully connected, activation, pooling, batch normalization, and others

DLA software consists of the DLA compiler and the DLA runtime stack. The offline compiler translates the neural network graph into a DLA loadable binary and can be invoked using NVIDIA TensorRT™. The runtime stack consists of the DLA firmware, kernel mode driver, and user mode driver.

JetPack 6.1 includes DLA 3.14

cuDNN

CUDA Deep Neural Network library provides high-performance primitives for deep learning frameworks. It provides highly tuned implementations for standard routines such as forward and backward convolution, pooling, normalization, and activation layers.

JetPack 6.1 includes cuDNN 9.3.0

CUDA

CUDA Toolkit provides a comprehensive development environment for C and C++ developers building GPU-accelerated applications. The toolkit includes a compiler for NVIDIA GPUs, math libraries, and tools for debugging and optimizing the performance of your applications.

JetPack 6.1 includes CUDA 12.6.10

Multimedia API

The Jetson Multimedia API package provides low level APIs for flexible application development.

Camera application API: libargus offers a low-level frame-synchronous API for camera applications, with per frame camera parameter control, multiple (including synchronized) camera support, and EGL stream outputs. RAW output CSI cameras needing ISP can be used with either libargus or GStreamer plugin. In either case, the V4L2 media-controller sensor driver API is used.

Sensor driver API: V4L2 API enables video decode, encode, format conversion and scaling functionality. V4L2 for encode opens up many features like bit rate control, quality presets, low latency encode, temporal tradeoff, motion vector maps, and more.

Computer Vision

VPI (Vision Programing Interface) is a software library that provides Computer Vision / Image Processing algorithms implemented on multiple hardware accelerators found on Jetson such as PVA (Programmable Vision Accelerator), GPU, NVDEC(NVIDIA Decoder), NVENC (NVIDIA Encoder), VIC (Video Image Compositor) and so on.

JetPack 6.1 includes VPI 3.2 with following highlights:

• New Algorithms:
  • AprilTag Detector and Pose Estimator supporting PVA and CPU backends.
  • Dynamic Remap supporting CUDA backend for generic geometrical transformations.
  • Recursive Gaussian Filter supported on CPU and CUDA backend providing superioru performance compared to colvolution Gaussian Filter for large sigma
• New PVA backend support for following algorithms :
  • Mix Channels
  • Crop Scaler
  • ORB feature detector (Descriptor Extractor only).
  • Pyramidal LK Optical Flow
• Up-to 5X speed up of PVA backends

Graphics

JetPack 6.1 includes the following graphics libraries:

• Vulkan® 1.3
  • Vulkan 1.3 Announcement
• Vulkan® SC 1.0
  • Vulkan SC is a low-level, deterministic, robust API that is based on Vulkan 1.2. This API enables state-of-the-art GPU-accelerated graphics and computation that can be deployed in safety-critical systems and that are certified to meet industry functional safety standards. Refer to https://www.khronos.org/vulkansc/ for more information.
  • Vulkan SC can also be invaluable for real-time non safety critical embedded applications. Vulkan SC increases determinism and reduces application size by shifting preparation of the run-time application environment either offline, or into application setup, as much as possible. This includes offline compilation of graphics pipelines that define how the GPU processes data, together with static memory allocation, that together enable detailed GPU control that can be rigorously specified and tested.
  • Vulkan SC 1.0 is evolved from Vulkan 1.2 and includes: the removal of runtime functionality that is not needed in safety-critical markets, an updated design to provide predictable execution times and results, and clarifications to remove potential ambiguity in its operation. For more details see https://www.khronos.org/blog/vulkan-sc-overview
  • Note: Jetson support for Vulkan SC is not safety certified.
• OpenWF™ Display 1.0
  • OpenWF Display is a Khronos API for low overhead interaction with the native display driver on Jetson and allows interaction with Vulkan SC to display images.
  • Note: Jetson support for OpenWF Display is not safety certified.
• OpenGL 4.6
  • OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardware-accelerated rendering.
• OpenGLES 3.2
  • OpenGLES is a cross-platform API for rendering advanced 2D and 3D graphics on embedded and mobile systems - including consoles, phones, appliances and vehicles. It consists of a well-defined subset of desktop OpenGL suitable for low-power devices, and provides a flexible and powerful interface between software and graphics acceleration hardware.
• GLX 1.4
  • GLX (initialism for "OpenGL Extension to the X Window System") is an extension to the X Window System core protocol providing an interface between OpenGL and the X Window System as well as extensions to OpenGL itself. It enables programs wishing to use OpenGL to do so within a window provided by the X Window System.
• EGL 1.5
  • Embedded Graphics Library (EGL) is an interface between the Khronos rendering APIs, such as OpenGL ES, and the underlying native platform window system. It handles graphics context management, surface/buffer binding, rendering synchronization, and enables high-performance, accelerated, mixed-mode 2D and 3D rendering by using other Khronos APIs.

Nsight Developer Tools

CUDA Toolkit provides a comprehensive development environment for C and C++ developers building high-performance GPU-accelerated applications with CUDA libraries. The toolkit includes Nsight Visual Studio Code Edition, Nsight Eclipse Plugins, debugging and profiling tools including Nsight Compute, and a toolchain for cross-compiling applications

NVIDIA Nsight Systems is a low overhead system-wide profiling tool, providing the insights developers need to analyze and optimize software performance.

NVIDIA Nsight Graphics is a standalone application for debugging and profiling graphics applications.

NVIDIA Nsight Deep Learning Designer is an integrated development environment that helps developers efficiently design and develop deep neural networks for in-app inference.

Nvidia Nsight Perf SDK is a graphics profiling toolbox for Vulkan and OpenGL enabling the collection of GPU performance metrics directly from user application.

Nsight System, Nsight Graphics, Nsight Compute, Nsight Perf SDK are all supported on Jetson Orin modules to assist development for autonomous machines.

JetPack 6.1 includes NVIDIA Nsight Systems v2024.5

JetPack 6.1 includes NVIDIA Nsight Graphics 2024.2

JetPack 6.1 includes NVIDIA Nsight Compute v2023.2 as part of the CUDA Toolkit 12.2

Supported SDKs and Tools

NVIDIA DeepStream SDK is a complete analytics toolkit for AI-based multi-sensor processing and video and audio understanding.

JetPack 6.1 supports DeepStream 7.1

NVIDIA Isaac™ ROS is a collection of hardware-accelerated packages that make it easier for ROS developers to build high-performance solutions on NVIDIA hardware including NVIDIA Jetson.

JetPack 6.1 will support Isaac ROS 3.0

Note: NVIDIA Isaac™ ROS will be available soon.

NVIDIA Holoscan is a sensor processing platform that streamlines the development and deployment of AI and high-performance computing (HPC) applications for real-time insights

JetPack 6.1 supports Holoscan SDK 2.6

NVIDIA Triton™ Inference Server simplifies deployment of AI models at scale. Triton Inference Server is open source and supports deployment of trained AI models from NVIDIA TensorRT, TensorFlow and ONNX Runtime on Jetson. On Jetson, Triton Inference Server is provided as a shared library for direct integration with C API.

PowerEstimator is a webapp that simplifies creation of custom power mode profiles and estimates Jetson module power consumption.

Cloud Native

Jetson brings Cloud-Native to the edge and enables technologies like containers and container orchestration. NVIDIA JetPack includes NVIDIA Container Runtime with Docker integration, enabling GPU accelerated containerized applications on Jetson platform.

NVIDIA hosts several container images for Jetson on NVIDIA NGC. Some are suitable for software development with samples and documentation and others are suitable for production software deployment, containing only runtime components. Find more information and a list of all container images at the Cloud-Native on Jetson page.

Security

NVIDIA Jetson modules include various security features including Hardware Root of Trust, Secure Boot, Hardware Cryptographic Acceleration, Trusted Execution Environment, Disk and Memory Encryption, Physical Attack Protection and more. Learn about the security features by jumping to the security section of the Jetson Linux Developer guide.

JetPack 6.1 Security Highlights include:

• Support for Firmware-based Trusted Platform Module (fTPM) on the T234 platform. Refer to the security page for all security features.

Documentation

• For a list of samples and documentation, see the JetPack documentation
• See the Jetson Support Resources page for links to hardware as well as software documentation

Webinars

• JetPack 6 Webinar series
• NVIDIA Jetson Software: Bringing NVIDIA Accelerated Technologies to the Edge

Support

Visit the NVIDIA Jetson forum for all your questions and issues. NVIDIA has a dedicated team of Jetson experts to support you.