Category: Jetson Xaiver NX

building and running deno 1.8 on a jetson xavier nx

whbeebe

I’ve been wrestling with building Deno on my Jetson Xavier NX running Nvidia’s version of Ubuntu 18.04.2 as part of L4T, or Linux For Tegra (although I tend to think of ‘T’ for Tensorflow). Deno is a reimplementation, if you will, of NodeJS in Rust, attempting to correct many of the bad design decisions that went into Node over time. Deno was created by Ryan Dahl, the original creator of NodeJS, so he should know where the skeletons of Node are buried.

The problem with installing and working with Deno on the Xavier is that it’s Arm-based, whereas all the other environments are x86-based. You can thus download and update (deno upgrade) Deno natively, whereas on the Xavier you need to install a native distribution of Rust, then build deno on the platform with cargo build deno. This worked for all of deno versions up to 1.6.7, then 1.7 was released and building deno on Arm failed repeatedly due to a failure to build librusty_v8. I filed a bug report over two weeks ago, and then, three days ago, I got a response from one of the devs telling me that there was “no pre-built 0.17.0 static library for aarch64 but there is one if you upgrade to 0.20.0.” Sure enough, when I re-ran cargo build deno and watched the task pull and build all the libraries, it pulled librusty_v8 version 0.20.0, which successfully built along with everything else. I have since closed the bug (see https://github.com/denoland/rusty_v8/issues/630 ).

The big draw for me is Deno’s experimental support for WebGPU API. I ran the example given in the release notes ( https://deno.land/posts/v1.8 ) and copied the results into the top of this post. I doubt that JavaScript running on Deno will replace Python as the front-end for ML running on the Jetson Xavier, but I can see it supporting Python, especially with web-based development. I am no fan of Python’s web frameworks, and I’ve lost my disdain for JavaScript over the past 12 months due to another task that showed I could use minimal JavaScript to cleanly solve a knotty problem. Deno also gives me plenty of powerful examples of programming in Rust, so there’s that angle.

Since retirement I’ve explored more interesting languages and their uses than I ever did in the last five years of my regular employment. It wasn’t so much ageism as it was my employer’s adamant insistence that development was their way or the highway. I’m now free to follow my own path(s) and finding what I’m learning to be new, interesting, and challenging in a good way.

building python 3.9.1 on jetpack 4.5 and the jetson xavier nx

whbeebe

These instructions will help you build Python 3.9.1 on the Jetson Xavier NX Development Kit running JetPack 4.5. There are two broad stages to building this version. The first is the installation of support developer libraries to allow all Python modules to successfully build, especially _ssl. If _ssl fails to build then pip will not be able to negotiate connectivity with any Python repo, making installation of modules fail. After the installation stage come the build steps.

Install Build Prerequisites

To build all Python modules the following libraries need to be installed. Simply copy-and-paste the following line:

sudo apt install zlib1g-dev libncurses5-dev libgdbm-dev libnss3-dev libssl-dev libreadline-dev libffi-dev libsqlite3-dev libbz2-dev

Build Python

Download the latest version of Python, build, and install:

  1. Download the latest Python, version 3.9.1, from https://www.python.org/downloads/.
  2. Untar the file (we’ll assume it’s downloaded to the default ~/Downloads):
    tar xvf Downloads/Python-3.9.1.tar.xz
  3. Make a build directory at the same level as the untarred source directory. In my case I named the build directory build-python-3.9.1
  4. Change directory into the build directory.
  5. From within the build directory execute the configure script:
    ../Python-3.9.1/configure --enable-optimizations
  6. Run make with all active cores:
    make -j $(nproc)

    On my machine I enabled all six cores of the Jetson Xavier NX. Running with fewer cores will result in a longer build time.

  7. Install into the alternate location for this version of Python:
    sudo -H make altinstall
  8. Check for the alternate location with which python3.9. It should return /usr/local/bin/python3.9.

I created a Python 3.9.1 virtual work environment, something I highly recommend. I do that to keep the stock and newly installed environments distinct from one another. These are the specific steps I used to create that virtual Python environment.

  1. In your home directory create a work folder. On my system I named it ‘vpython’. Change directory (cd) into it.
  2. Then create a Python VE:
    python3.9 -m venv 39
  3. While you’re there you might as well update pip. Always count on the pip bundled with any version to be out of date with the official version. Using my environment as an example:
    $HOME/vpython/39/bin/python3.9 -m pip install --upgrade pip

Now you’re ready to use the latest Python.

Install PyQt5

I use Python library PyQt5. In order to do that you must install Ubuntu’s Qt5 support libraries as well as the Python module.

  1. Install Ubuntu Qt5 support: sudo apt install qt5-default
  2. Enable Python 3.9 virtual environment: source $HOME/vpython/39/bin/activate
  3. Install Python PyQt5: pip install PyQt5

You’re pretty much free to use Python 3.9 with PyQt5 at this point.

Note that these directions also apply to installation on the Jetson Nano on the same Jetpack version.