JetsonHacks

Developing on NVIDIA® Jetson™ for AI on the Edge

NVIDIA Jetson TX1 Now on L4T 28.1 (JetPack 3.1)

One of the big changes in the new JetPack 3.1 release is that the NVIDIA Jetson TX1 now runs L4T 28.1, an Ubuntu 16.04 variant. The reason that this is important to know is that 28.1 runs Kernel version 4.4.38. In turn, that means that there are a lot of changes to the kernel itself and may require a little bit of rework on the existing codebase.

The JetsonHacks repositories on Github are no exception. There are many repositories which work with/around the older L4T kernels. A prime example is the librealsense installation library.

Because librealsense adds several different video modes to the uvcvideo driver, we made up a patch which adds those modes to the uvcvideo module source. This requires that the kernel and uvcvideo module be rebuilt and installed. Fortunately, those changes have migrated upstream and are now part of the 4.4 kernel which means that nothing needs to be changed in the kernel in order to recognize a RealSense camera on a Jetson TX1 or Jetson TX2.

Of course, there’s still an install script for librealsense on the Jetson, it’s just been updated for L4T 28.1. The older version is still available after being tagged and stored in the repository.

There are many scripts that may become a little flaky because of the kernel change, and you shouldn’t expect the older articles on this site to reflect the newer kernel changes. Be on the lookout!

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4 Responses

  1. Is there a way to upgrade the TX1 to the latest Jetpack without loosing what’s already installed on it? In other words, does it flash a completely new OS?
    Also, Do you know if I should expect any performance boost when running Caffe?
    Thanks 🙂

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