NVIDIA JetPack SDK powering the Jetson modules is the most comprehensive solution and provides full development environment for building end-to-end accelerated AI applications and shortens time to market.

JetPack includes Jetson Linux with bootloader, Linux kernel, Ubuntu desktop environment, and a complete set of libraries for acceleration of GPU computing, multimedia, graphics, and computer vision. It also includes samples, documentation, and developer tools for both host computer and developer kit, and supports higher level SDKs such as DeepStream for streaming video analytics, Isaac for robotics, and Riva for conversational AI.

JetPack 6 is the biggest upgrade ever. It not only brings an updated Kernel and updated Ubuntu root file system but also includes novel features never before available on Jetson. For the first time, JetPack 6 brings the flexibility to run any Linux Kernel and offers wider options of Linux based distros from Jetson ecosystem partners. Read below for details on JetPack 6.

JetPack 6.0 Developer Preview

JetPack 6.0 Developer Preview (DP) is the first release of JetPack 6. It includes Jetson Linux 36.2 which packs Linux Kernel 5.15 and Ubuntu 22.04 based root file system. JetPack 6 supports all NVIDIA Jetson Orin modules and developer kits. Our upstreaming effort of Jetson changes to upstream Linux kernel has now enabled novel features like flexibility to run any upstream Linux Kernel (greater than Kernel 5.14) and expanded choices of Linux distro options on Jetson. In addition to including an updated Kernel and Ubuntu, JetPack 6 also brings in the latest NVIDIA AI compute stack with CUDA 12.2, Tensorrt 8.6, cuDNN 8.9, VPI 3.0 and others.

Note that JetPack 6.0 is a developer preview release and not intended for production. It is ready for starting your development on Jetson Orin with JetPack 6 software stack. This release does not include any security features or OTA features. The production quality release of JetPack 6 is targeted for March 2024 and will include security and OTA features along with production quality stack. Please carefully read the release notes of JetPack 6.0 Developer Preview for known issues and other details.

Installing JetPack

Debian Package Method

JetPack can be installed or upgraded using a Debian package management tool running on Jetson. NVIDIA also hosts runtime and development debian meta packages for all JetPack components. The runtime packages do not include samples and documentations while the development packages include these and are intended for development. Users can install full JetPack or only runtime JetPack components over Jetson Linux.

Please refer to JetPack documentation for instructions on the list of debian packages we host. To install Jetpack on top of Jetson Linux 36.2, all you need to do is “apt install nvidia-jetpack

NOTE: APT upgrade from JetPack 5 to JetPack 6 is not supported. To transition from JetPack 5 to JetPack 6 on your developer kits, please install using SDK Manager or manual flashing.

SD Card Image Method

Key Features in JetPack 6.0

Jetson Linux

NVIDIA Jetson Linux 36.2 provides the Linux Kernel 5.15, UEFI based bootloader, Ubuntu 22.04 based root file system, NVIDIA drivers, necessary firmwares, toolchain and more.

JetPack 6.0 Developer Preview (DP) includes Jetson Linux 36.2 with following highlights: (Please refer to release notes for additional details)

  • Supports all Jetson Orin modules and developer Kits.
  • LTS Kernel 5.15.
  • Ubuntu 22.04 based root file system.
  • Flexibility to bring any upstream Linux Kernel.
  • Expanded choices of Linux based distros. Refer to Linux Distros section below.
  • Multimedia:
    • Gstreamer encoder plugin now supports Copy-timestamp
    • Support of YUV444 in Gstreamer nvvidconv plugin
    • Background color and blending support in Gstreamer nvcompositor plugin
    • Support of NV12 in Gstreamer nvjpegenc plugin
    • Support of NV12, GRAY8, YUY2, Y42B, Y444, RGBA in Gstreamer nvjpegdec plugin

Linux Distros on Jetson

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

Canonical Ubuntu: Ubuntu 22.04 offered by Canonical.

Red Hat: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.3 offered by Red Hat

Windriver: Commercial embedded Linux OS from Windriver.

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, Foundaries.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 6.0 DP includes TensorRT 8.6.2

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 6.0 DP 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 6.0 DP includes cuDNN 8.9.4

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 6.0 DP includes CUDA 12.2.12

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 6.0 DP includes VPI 3.0 with following highlights:

  • New Algorithms:
    • Crop Scaler on GPU: Crops rectangular regions from the input frames and rescales them all to the same dimensions.
    • DCF Tracker on GPU and PVA: Multi-object tracker that employs a discriminative correlation filter for visual object tracking.

Graphics

JetPack 6.0 DP includes the following graphics libraries:

  • Vulkan® 1.3
  • 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.

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.

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

JetPack 6.0 DP includes NVIDIA Nsight Systems v2023.4

JetPack 6.0 DP includes NVIDIA Nsight Graphics 2023.3

Supported SDKs and Tools

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

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.

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 6.0 DP supports DeepStream 6.4

JetPack 6.0 DP will support Isaac ROS 3.0

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 6.0 Developer Preview does not include security features.

JetPack Documentation and Webinars

Documentation

Webinars

Support

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


For older versions of JetPack, please visit the JetPack Archive.