Nvidia releases version 4.6 of its AI SDK

28 July 2021 Computer/Embedded Technology

Nvidia has rolled out version 4.6 of its JetPack SDK, a production release supporting the Jetson AGX Xavier series, Jetson Xavier NX, Jetson TX2, Jetson TX1 and Jetson Nano.

JetPack 4.6 includes support for Triton Inference Server, new versions of CUDA, cuDNN and TensorRT, VPI 1.1 with support for new computer vision algorithms and Python bindings, L4T 32.6.1 with over-the-air (OTA) update features, security features and a new flashing tool to flash internal or external media connected to Jetson.

In addition to the L4T-base container image (a Linux-based software distribution for the Jetson embedded computing platform), new CUDA runtime and TensorRT runtime container images are released on Nvidia NGC, which include CUDA and TensorRT runtime components inside the container itself, as opposed to mounting those components from the host. These containers are built to containerise AI applications for deployment. The L4T-base container continues to support existing containerised applications that expect it to mount CUDA and TensorRT components from the host.

Highlights of JetPack 4.6 are:

• Support for Jetson AGX Xavier Industrial module.

• Support for new 20 W mode on Jetson Xavier NX, enabling better video encode and video decode performance and higher memory bandwidth. The included 10 W and 15 W nvpmodel configurations will perform exactly as did the 10 W and 20 W modes with previous JetPack releases.

• Image based over-the-air update tools for developing end-to-end OTA solutions for Jetson products in the field.

• A/B root file system redundancy to flash, maintain and update redundant root file systems. Enhances fault tolerance during OTA by falling back to the working root file system slot in case of a failure.

• A new flashing tool to flash internal or external media connected to Jetson. The new tool uses initial RAM disk for flashing and is up to 1,5 times faster when flashing compared to the previous method.

• Secure boot is enhanced for Jetson TX2 series to extend encryption support to kernel, kernel-dtb and initrd.

• Disk encryption of external media supported to protect data at rest for Jetson AGX Xavier series, Jetson Xavier NX and Jetson TX2.

• NVMe driver added to CBoot for Jetson Xavier NX and Jetson AGX Xavier series. Enables loading kernel, kernel-dtb and initrd from the root file system on NVMe.

• Enhanced Jetson-IO tools to configure the camera header interface and dynamically add support for a camera using device tree overlays.

• Support for configuring Raspberry-PI IMX219 or Raspberry-PI High Def IMX477 at runtime using the Jetson-IO tool on Jetson Nano 2 GB, Jetson Nano and Jetson Xavier NX developer kits.

• Support for Scalable Video Coding (SVC) H.264 encoding.

• Support for YUV444 encoding and decoding.

• Direct-downloadable links to JetPack and L4T debian packages for Jetson.

Credit(s)

Altron Arrow

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