As of 12 Nov 2025, the master-l4t-r38.2.x branch supports JetPack 7.0/L4T R38.2.2. Note that R38.2.2 only updates some of the components; the rest remain at 38.2.1.

Changes from L4T R36.4.4/JetPack 6.2.1

This release introduces support for the Jetson AGX Thor development kit, and supports only AGX Thor targets. Machine configurations for the Orin family remain in the tree, but are not usable and not supported.

See the release notes in the NVIDIA documentation for this release for information on new and updated features:

• Jetson Linux R38.2 release notes
• Jetson Linux R38.2.1 release notes
• JetPack 7.0 download page (note that this link is not version-tagged)

Note that NVIDIA has not provided release notes for R38.2.2.

BSP changes

• Many changes are present to support Thor hardware. Note that L4T R38.2.x does not support Orin hardware. Machine definitions have not been removed from the layer, but they should not be used.

Flashing process changes

Flashing in Jetson Linux for Thor targets is performed through a "unified" flashing process that is hidden under the L4T initrd/kernel flashing scripts.

For meta-tegra builds, after unpacking your tegraflash tarball, use initrd-flash while connected via USB to your Thor device to generate/sign the binary artifacts, stage them to a unified-flash workspace, and run the unified flashing scripts to flash the device. You can use ./initrd-flash --external-only to re-flash only the external (rootfs) drive, ./initrd-flash -k NAME to re-flash just the named partition, or ./initrd-flash --qspi-only to re-flash only the boot firmware in the QSPI flash. The script also takes a --debug option for enabling more verbose logging in the unified flashing tool.

See NVIDIA release notes and documentation for more information.

Kernel changes

The Linux kernel is now taken from the Ubuntu "Noble" release, and is based on Linux 6.8.12.

JetPack changes

JetPack 7.0 upgrades most of the JetPack content. See the NVIDIA documentation for more information.

CUDA 13, included in JetPack 7.0, supports the use of gcc/g++ 15 as the host toolchain, so the gcc-for-nvcc recipes, which were used for providing an older toolchain for use with nvcc, have been dropped.

DeepStream SDK

DeepStream 8.0 is available. The recipes for DeepStream in the meta-tegra-community layer have been updated.