Canonical Pledges "Long-Term Support" for Ubuntu on the NVIDIA Jetson Thor Family of AI Modules

Canonical has confirmed plans to support NVIDIA's recently-launched Jetson Thor family of edge artificial intelligence (edge AI) modules in its Ubuntu Linux distribution — continuing a longstanding partnership that sees Ubuntu used as the base for NVIDIA's Jetpack distribution, formerly known as Linux 4 Tegra (L4T).

"The official support from Canonical will offer optimized Ubuntu images and enterprise-grade stability and security," the company claimed of its support for the Jetson Thor family. "This commitment to long-term support and security updates ensures enterprise-grade stability and reliability to the combination of Ubuntu and NVIDIA Jetson system-on-modules."

NVIDIA opened orders for the Jetson AGX Thor Developer Kit earlier this month, after teasing the device back in March last year. The latest in the company's Jetson range of systems-on-modules (SOMs), the Jetson Thor family is the first to feature the company's Blackwell graphics processor architecture — delivering, in the $3,499 Jetson AGX Thor Developer Kit, a claimed 2,070 tera-floating point operations per second (TFLOPS) of sparse FP4-precision compute from 2,560 CUDA cores, 96 Tensor cores, a 14-core Arm Neoverse V3AE processor, a PVA v3 vision accelerator, and 128GB of LPDDR5X memory.

As with previous Jetson devices, the Jetson Thor family is designed for use with NVIDIA's Jetpack Linux distribution — but will also receive official Ubuntu images from Canonical itself. "Canonical’s official Ubuntu image for NVIDIA Jetson Thor will enable developers and enterprises to create breakthrough AI solutions," Canonical claims, "such as vision AI agents, generative AI edge applications, medical devices and autonomous robots. The work between Canonical and NVIDIA will enable sustainable deployment of generative AI applications at the edge – for the entire Jetson Thor series of modules."

Canonical already offers images for the Jetson AGX Orin, Orin Nano, and Orin NX modules, based on the three-year-old Ubuntu Server 22.04 platform; the company has promised that images for the Jetson Thor family "will be announced soon," but at the time of writing had not committed to a release timescale.

"These images are optimized for both the developer kit and the modules," the company says, "ensuring you can build the most powerful edge AI applications, and scale their deployment successfully. Using these images is fast and easy: simply select the OS image to match your hardware, flash it onto a USB or NVMe disk, and load it onto your board. For Ubuntu Core, you will be able to download pre-built images for exploration and experimentation."

All currently-available Ubuntu images for supported NVIDIA Jetson modules are available on the Ubuntu website.