Question for NVIDIA: why is your documentation so bad?

I’ve been struggling with the TX1 dev kit for a couple of months now, and it has been endless frustration. The documentation, such as it is, is poorly organized, important pieces are missing, parts of it refer to older versions of the sofware only, there is no documentation roadmap. Worse, some parts are given as html pages, other parts as pdf documents. How is one supposed to search it?

Does nVidia want people to develop embedded systems with the tx1? If so, why don’t you document it properly and provide working software? If not, please just tell us so we start looking for alternatives.

Yours in frustration

ji

2 Likes

Have you seen the wiki yet? [url]http://elinux.org/Jetson_TX1[/url]

Hopefully this presents it in a more streamlined manner. As I’m sure you know, system-on-modules such as Jetson TX1 are highly complex and there are literally reams of docs for it (have you seen the TX1 TRM yet hehe?). The docs are extensive if anything. Of course, we are always open to feedback if you’ve identified specific gaps in the documentation. At the same time it’s impossible to provide extra docs for all upstream Linux software packages in the distribution outside of NVIDIA’s contributions. Offering a standard distro (Ubuntu), our core docs tend to focus on the Jetson hardware and OS.

As a developer personally, I find Jetson’s docs to be quality and open to anyone, something not always typically available in embedded SoM market.
At NVIDIA we strive to enable developers with the materials and support they need to be successful with Jetson, so please let us know your requests.

I understand complexity of SOM and appreciate Nvidia has provided many valuable documents. This forum is the only place for support of TX1 from Nvidia, but some basic questions such as how to use on board camera under L4T 24.1 got no answer from Nvidia.

Memory leak for lock ups has been reported but not addressed by Nvidia. R24.1 source has not been updated since it’s release.

Jijikos voiced frustration, I’m sure many other developers have the same feelings. I understand it takes time to update kernel/file systems and documentations, but at least Nvidia should provide reasonable support on this forum to answer some basic questions directly related to TX1 itself, such how to make on board camera working.

There’s priority on resolving reports of the newly release Ubuntu aarch64 userspace and the team is working to prepare the next release, 24.2. For software QA reasons it isn’t NVIDIA’s policy to issue inter-release updates to Jetpack/L4T or the official source, but when possible we post patches here to the forum.

The memory leak referred to resides in upstream gedit / gnome (Ubuntu) and is unrelated to the kernel or GLX/X11 drivers. As when bringing up any new distribution, we appreciate your patience as issues with upstream packages are looked into, especially when the architecture of the distribution is still fairly new (for example, there were many different boards using armhf filesystem but relatively few still on aarch64). Packages in the userspace repos are from the Ubuntu servers.

We’ll look into questions about the onboard camera and 24.1, thanks for your feedback and highlighting the topic.