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Pins the Jetson clocks the real-time loops depend on:
  • the strongest supported power mode — MAXN SUPER when it is present in the active /etc/nvpmodel.conf, otherwise MAXN (mode IDs vary by Jetson configuration) — which uncaps the clock ceiling the other two pins reach (nvpmodel otherwise caps how high the governor and engine clocks can go),
  • the NVENC / VIC engine devfreq nodes, so the camera relay’s hardware H.264 encode stays low-latency (the default devfreq governor scales them for throughput, which roughly triples per-frame encode time), and
  • the CPU governor, so the bursty IK loop isn’t underclocked.
These pins reset on every reboot, so the one-command install wires this into the axol.service systemd unit as an ExecStartPre, re-pinning the clocks at every boot, and runs it once during install. It is not called from teleop / collect-data / serve — those entry points just run. If changing the power-gating configuration requires a reboot, Axol declines the immediate reboot so it cannot interrupt an installation or robot session. It records the selected mode for NVIDIA’s nvpmodel.service to apply on the next natural boot; axol.service is explicitly ordered after that service before it re-pins the clocks.
NVIDIA classifies MAXN and MAXN SUPER as experimental, unconstrained modes and does not recommend sustained heavy workloads in them unless the module was flashed with the corresponding -maxn configuration and its more conservative thermal settings. Ensure the robot has adequate power and cooling and monitor thermal throttling during sustained local inference or training. Axol normally selects a named mode exposed by the active BSP configuration; on legacy or unreadable configurations it attempts NVIDIA’s conventional mode 0 and reports any rejection. It does not change the board’s thermal policy.
Best-effort and a no-op on non-Jetson machines. Pinning needs root: run as root, or you’ll be prompted for sudo once on a terminal; if escalation isn’t possible it logs the manual command and continues.