TorizonCore 6.1.0 Quarterly Release

We are pleased to announce the TorizonCore 6.1.0 quarterly release for Toradex’s System on Modules.

TorizonCore is our operating system that powers Torizon, a DevOps platform that simplifies the development and maintenance of embedded Linux software. TorizonCore is designed to be used out-of-the-box on devices requiring high reliability, allowing you to focus on your application instead of on building and maintaining an operating system.

Torizon uses software containers, making it simple to add functionality to your system in a way that is both secure and easy to maintain. Torizon supports hardware acceleration in containers and graphical user interfaces.

This release includes all updates from the previous 6.x.y TorizonCore releases.

Updates and Highlights

TorizonCore
Debian Packages and Containers

Other Updates

Intended Use

The TorizonCore 6.1.0 Quarterly Release is a production-grade release. Some of the documentation and tooling features are still work in progress, which implies limitations on their usage. Once these components get updated, you will be able to use all workflows supported by the TorizonCore 5 series. You will learn more about this in the next section.

Therefore, if you are in production with TorizonCore, we recommend that you continue to use release 5.7.0. Otherwise, if you are in evaluation or development and the limitations don’t block you, we recommend moving to this quarterly release. While still using Bullseye containers until the tooling is updated, you will already be able to enjoy the new VS Code Extension v2 - ApolloX.

General Considerations
  • Debian Containers for Torizon
    Debian Bookworm containers were published on Docker Hub with the major tag “3“ and are expected to work on all SoMs supported by this release. They are not usable out of the box for the following reasons:
    • The documentation has not been updated yet, and some changes will prevent the graphical containers from starting.
    • VS Code Extension v2 - ApolloX templates still use the Debian Bullseye containers.
    • The environment variables for container tags on TorizonCore have not been bumped yet, therefore if you use them to run containers, as instructed in many places in our docs, you will end up running the Debian Bullseye containers.
    • The debian-cross-toolchains, chromium, cog, rt-validation, debian-dotnet-development-images, and samples containers have not been updated yet to Debian Bookworm.
    • The NXP downstream packages for gstreamer-plugins-base, gstreamer-plugins-good, gstreamer-plugins-bad, chromium, and opencv were not released yet.

Debian Bullseye containers were tested and are expected to work. While this may enable you to early adopt TorizonCore 6, we don’t intend to regularly update and test Bullseye containers for TorizonCore 6. As soon as the tooling and documentation are updated for Bookworm containers, you should use them.

  • VS Code IDE Extension
    Support for TorizonCore 6 is being added to the Torizon VS Code Extension v2 (ApolloX), which is still on Toradex Labs. We will have a migration guide from the VS Code v1.x series soon.

It still uses the Debian Bullseye containers, which are expected to work for development. Some templates from IDE 1.0 are not available yet, such as the ASP.NET, and on the other hand, some new templates for other languages and frameworks are available. It is important to note that the templates do not include hardware-accelerated containers for downstream-based modules yet.
Given the limitations, we are looking forward to your early feedback, as v2 has exciting new features such as support for debugging multiple containers at once.

  • TorizonCore Builder
    Support for TorizonCore Builder (TCB) on TorizonCore 6 is being added. In addition to that, a review of the device tree and device tree overlays workflow is in place. These are the resources known to not work or that may not work with TorizonCore 6:
  • Bootloader, Remote and Offline Updates

Upgrade from TorizonCore 5 to TorizonCore 6 using the Torizon updates - either remote or offline - is not yet supported. You must wait until advised to upgrade, and meanwhile, only perform updates between TorizonCore 5.x releases, or between TorizonCore 6.x releases, not mixing them.
Upgrading from 5.x to 6.x using Torizon Remote OTA or Offline updates requires a bootloader update. Despite Bootloader updates being enabled on TorizonCore by default, there are no bootloader packages in the Torizon Platform Services yet. When they are published, it will be possible to perform bootloader updates out-of-the-box. This will unlock the possibility to upgrade from TorizonCore 5.7.0 to 6.x through a patch release 5.7.y that is not yet released. If you have an interest in early testing, please get in contact.
A patch release for TorizonCore 5 with bootloader updates enabled is planned, and to upgrade to TorizonCore 6, all users will need to first upgrade to this new patch release. The workflow will look as follows:

  • TorizonCore 5.7.0 → TorizonCore 5.7.x patch release → Bootloader upgrade → TorizonCore 6

Official documentation will be provided once this feature is released.

Please also note that TorizonCore is built on top of the Toradex BSP Layers for the Yocto Project. As this quarterly BSP release is not as fully featured compared to the 5.7.0 LTS, hardware support and features at the BSP level may impact TorizonCore functionality. Read the BSP Layers and Reference Images for Yocto Project release news to learn more.

Get more updates on this from our Release Notes.

Hardware Support

A quarterly release is intended to be used in a production environment only with volume products, as long as they are supported by TorizonCore.

  • Volume products: Apalis iMX6, Colibri iMX6DL, Colibri iMX7D 1GB
    This release is intended to be used in production on these modules.

  • Sample products: Apalis iMX8, Colibri iMX8X, Verdin iMX8M Mini, Colibri iMX6ULL 1GB, Verdin iMX8M Plus
    Due to the hardware status of the samples, this release is intended for development.
    For Verdin, only the second generation of Verdin products is supported.

  • Support for Apalis iMX8 and Colibri iMX8X

The latest release supporting them is the TorizonCore 5.7.0 Quarterly Release - LTS.
They will be supported in the next releases.