NVIDIA TensorRT for DRIVE OS
NVIDIA TensorRT 8.6.12 Release Notes for DRIVE OS (PDF) - Last updated November 15, 2023

Revision History

This is the revision history of the NVIDIA TensorRT 8.6.12 Release Notes for DRIVE OS.

Document Revision History

Date Summary of Change
July 24, 2023 Initial draft
July 25, 2023 Start of review
October 27, 2023 End of review
October 30, 2023 Approval review

Chapter 3 Updates

Date Summary of Change
October 12, 2023 Documented all new features and enhancements for TensorRT 8.6.12.

Chapter 4 Updates

Date Summary of Change
October 12, 2023 Documented all fixed issues for TensorRT 8.6.12.

Chapter 7 Updates

Date Summary of Change
October 12, 2023 Updated applicable release properties and software versions for TensorRT 8.6.12.

Abstract

NVIDIA TensorRT is a C++ library that facilitates high performance inference on NVIDIA GPUs. It is designed to work in connection with deep learning frameworks that are commonly used for training. TensorRT focuses specifically on running an already trained network quickly and efficiently on a GPU for the purpose of generating a result; also known as inferencing. These release notes describe the key features, software enhancements and improvements, and known issues for the TensorRT 8.6.12 product package.

1. TensorRT for DRIVE OS

1.1. DRIVE OS Linux "Standard"

The NVIDIA® TensorRT™ 8.6.12 for DRIVE® OS release includes a TensorRT Standard+Safety Proxy package. The Linux Standard+Safety Proxy package for NVIDIA DRIVE OS users of TensorRT, contains the builder, standard runtime, proxy runtime, consistency checker, parsers, Python bindings, sample code, standard and safety headers, and documentation. The builder can create engines suitable for the standard runtime, proxy runtime, and DLA. This release includes safety headers and the capability to build standard engines restricted to the scope of operations that will be supported by the safety and proxy runtimes in this and future NVIDIA DRIVE OS 6.0 releases.

1.2. DRIVE OS QNX "Standard"

The NVIDIA TensorRT 8.6.12 for DRIVE OS release includes a TensorRT Standard+Safety Proxy package. The QNX Standard+Safety Proxy package for NVIDIA DRIVE OS users of TensorRT contains the builder, standard runtime, proxy runtime, consistency checker, parsers, sample code, standard and safety headers, and documentation. The builder can create engines suitable for the standard runtime, proxy runtime, safety runtime, and DLA.

1.3. DRIVE OS QNX for Safety

The safety package is available in the NVIDIA DRIVE OS 6.0.9.0 release. The safety package for NVIDIA DRIVE OS users of TensorRT, which is only available on QNX safety, contains the safety runtime, safety headers only, and the API documentation specific to the safety runtime.

1.4. DRIVE OS for Safety Proxy

Proxy runtime
The TensorRT proxy runtime is a version of the safety runtime for platforms that are not safety certified. This includes NVIDIA DRIVE OS x86 SDK, NVIDIA DRIVE OS Linux SDK, NVIDIA DRIVE OS Linux PDK, NVIDIA DRIVE OS QNX SDK and NVIDIA DRIVE OS QNX PDK. The proxy runtime is part of the development flow for safety but it is not certified itself. The proxy runtime only supports engines with engine capability kSAFETY (safe engines).
Safety headers
Headers allow applications to compile against the proxy runtime and the safety runtime.
Safety runtime
The safety runtime is also a library that allows applications to load serialized engine plans and perform inference. It is only available for QNX safety. The safety runtime only supports engines with engine capability kSAFETY (safe engines).

2. Release Highlights

2.2. Planned Upcoming Changes

The following sections describe planned, upcoming changes for a future release.

3. New Features and Enhancements

This release includes support for these new features and enhancements.

ILayer Scope Relaxation

The TensorRT safety runtime relaxes the restrictions on the following ILayer:
  • IActivationLayer: the minimum rank of the input and output tensors for IActivationLayer is relaxed to 0.
  • IConstantLayer: the batch, channel, and spatial dimension restrictions for IConstantLayer was removed.
  • IElementWiseLayer: the minimum rank of the input and output tensors for IElementWiseLayer is relaxed to 0.
  • IGatherLayer: the minimum rank of the input index tensors and output tensors for IGatherLayer is relaxed to 0. The minimum rank of the input data tensors for IGatherLayer is relaxed to 1.
  • IIdentityLayer: the minimum rank of the input and output tensors for IIdentityLayer is relaxed to 0.
  • IPluginV2Layer: the minimum rank of the input and output tensors for IPluginV2Layer is relaxed to 0. Index tensors with precision INT32 are supported.
  • IScaleLayer: the batch, channel, and spatial dimension restrictions for IScaleLayer was removed.
  • IShuffleLayer: the minimum rank of the output tensor for IShuffleLayer is relaxed to 0.

DLA Layer Scope Relaxation

The TensorRT DLA relaxes the restrictions on the following ILayers, refer to Layer Support and Restrictions for more information.
  • IReduceLayer: IReduceLayer with the Max operation is supported where any combination of the CHW is reduced.
  • IElementWiseLayer: IElementWiseLayer with the Equal, Div, Pow, Greater, and Less operations is supported. The broadcasting is supported with restrictions.
  • IUnaryLayer: IUnaryLayer operations: Sin, Cos, and Atan are supported.

TensorRT Standard Build

The TensorRT 8.6 release includes changes to the TensorRT 8.6.1 standard builder and runtime that appear in TensorRT for DRIVE OS 6.0. For more information, refer to the NVIDIA TensorRT 8.6.1 Release Notes.

Documentation Changes

The TensorRT 8.6.12 documentation has been updated accordingly:
  • The NVIDIA TensorRT 8.6.12 Developer Guide for DRIVE OS is based on the enterprise TensorRT 8.6.1 release. We have modified the TensorRT 8.6.1 Developer Guide documentation for DRIVE OS 6.0.9 accuracy. The TensorRT safety content has been removed.
  • The TensorRT safety content is in the NVIDIA TensorRT 8.6.12 Safety Developer Guide Supplement for DRIVE OS. Refer to this PDF for all TensorRT safety specific documentation.

4. Fixed Issues

The following NVIDIA DRIVE OS issues from the previous release are resolved in this release.
Table 1. Fixed Issues in TensorRT 8.6.12
Reference ID Module Description
4138970 Consistency checker The consistency checker will report an error when a standalone IScaleLayer is not fused with other layers and the TensorRT builder selects INT8 formats for its I/O tensor
4157177 TensorRT builder An assertion error will occur from the TensorRT builder if an IActivationLayer serves as the input for an IElementwiseLayer and is also the input for another layer.
4220077 TensorRT builder If the Matmul operator is followed by an Add operator, and the product of the input tensor dimensions (excluding the last dimension) of the Matmul operator is larger than 4096, the TensorRT builder may report an error.
4125845 TensorRT builder Some networks with Convolution layers may fail to build when the builderOptimizationLevel is set to 4 or 5.
4143531 TensorRT runtime

Networks may fail with safe CUDA error when switching to the Operational State for NvDVMS (DRIVE OS VM State Management) due to the violation to DOS_RES_107.

This issue is fixed except under narrow circumstances. Refer to 4350817 under Known Issues for more information.

5. Known Limitations

Table 2. Known Limitations
Feature Module Description
DLA TensorRT DLA is not supported through the TensorRT safety runtime. The DLA loadables for standard and safety can be consumed by the cuDLA runtime and the NvMedia runtime.
DLA TensorRT When running on DLA, various layers have restrictions on supported parameters and input shapes. Some existing limitations for the convolution, fully connected, concatenation, and pooling layers were newly documented in this release. Refer to the NVIDIA TensorRT 8.6.12 Developer Guide for DRIVE OS for details.
DLA TensorRT When running INT8 networks on DLA using TensorRT, avoid marking intermediate tensors as network outputs to reduce quantization errors by allowing layers to be fused and retain higher precision for intermediate results.
DLA TensorRT
There are two modes of SoftMax where the mode is chosen automatically based on the shape of the input tensor, where:
  • the first mode triggers when all non-batch, non-axis dimensions are 1, and
  • the second mode triggers in other cases if valid.

Refer to the NVIDIA TensorRT 8.6.12 Developer Guide for DRIVE OS for details.

DLA TensorRT

The DLA compiler can remove identity transposes, but it cannot fuse multiple adjacent transpose layers into a single transpose layer. Likewise, for reshape.

For example, given a TensorRT IShuffleLayer consisting of two non-trivial transposes and an identity reshape in between, the shuffle layer will be translated into two consecutive DLA transpose layers, unless you merge the transposes together manually in the model definition in advance.

DLA TensorRT Running networks on DLA with large batch sizes may produce incorrect outputs. It is suggested to use batch size up to 64 to run networks on DLA.
Layers TensorRT For a list of safety-specific layer limitations, refer to the NVIDIA TensorRT 8.6.12 Safety Developer Guide Supplement for DRIVE OS.
I/O Formats TensorRT When using vectorized I/O formats, the extent of a tensor in a vectorized dimension might not be a multiple of the vector length. Elements in a partially occupied vector that are not within the tensor are referred to here as vector-padding.
  • For input tensors, the application shall set vector-padding elements to zero.
  • For output tensors, the value of vector-padding elements is undefined. In a future release, TensorRT will support setting them to zero.
Safety samples TensorRT We cannot use -Xcompiler -Wno-deprecated-declarations options for safety samples; that is a standard certified option. We only add it for standard builds. Seeing the deprecated warnings during the build is expected for this case.
Execution context TensorRT The GPU memory allocated to each execution context is limited to 4 GiB. An error will be reported if more GPU memory is required.
Execution context TensorRT Users of DRIVE OS must ensure that enqueueV3() is not called concurrently by multiple execution contexts created from the same engine instance.
Restricted mode TensorRT If layer precision is not explicitly set, IBuilder::isNetworkSupported may return True and building a standard engine with the kSAFETY_SCOPE flag may pass while building a safe engine fails with the same network.

6. Known Issues

Table 3. Known Issues
Reference ID Module Description
3656116 TensorRT runtime

What is the issue? There is an up to 7% performance regression for the 3D-UNet networks compared to TensorRT 8.4 EA when running in INT8 precision on NVIDIA Orin due to a functionality fix.

How does it impact the customer? When running 3D-UNet networks in INT8 precision, the latency will be up to 7% longer than in TensorRT 8.4 EA.

If there is a workaround, what is it? To work around this issue, set the input type and format to kINT8 and kCHW32, respectively.

When can we expect the fix? We do not plan to fix this performance regression since it was caused by a necessary fix for an accuracy issue.

Is it for Standard/Safety, SDK/PDK? Standard, SDK

3263411 TensorRT builder

What is the issue? For some networks, building and running an engine in the standard runtime will have better performance than the safety runtime. This can be due to various limitations in scope of the safety runtime including more limited tactics, tensor size limits, and operations supported in the safety scope.

How does it impact the customer? Inference in the safety runtime may be significantly slower than in the standard runtime.

If there is a workaround, what is it? Depending on the network, it may or may not be possible to reorganize operations into a more efficient form matching the safety runtime scope.

What is the recommendation? It is recommended to work with NVIDIA and provide proxy networks as early as possible that demonstrate key performance metrics close to actual production networks.

Is it for Standard/Safety, SDK/PDK? Safety, SDK

3793130 TensorRT runtime

What is the issue? Enabling the CUDA-graph option may cause the safety runtime to perform less efficiently compared to the proxy runtime for some networks. This discrepancy is due to the different objectives of the safety and proxy runtime. The safety runtime has more restrictive constraints to fulfill safety goals, resulting in different implementations between safety and proxy runtime.

How does it impact the customer? Using the CUDA-graph for inference in the safety runtime may result in slower performance compared to the proxy runtime. However, this can vary depending on the inference network.

If there is a workaround, what is it? It is recommended to check whether enabling CUDA-graph improves performance on the networks in production. Since the safety implementation with CUDA-graph comes with additional error checking and more deterministic execution, it is recommended to conduct cost-benefit analysis to decide if using CUDA-graph is beneficial to the use case. It is also recommended to work with NVIDIA and provide proxy networks as early as possible that demonstrate key performance metrics close to actual production networks.

When can we expect the fix? In order to achieve safety, the implementation might require further support on error-checking and robustness measures. This could demand extra CPU/GPU cycles. However, in certain scenarios, the safety implementation might be faster since it does not support some features in proxy runtime. The performance parity will continue to improve in the future releases but it might not be completely realized.

Is it for Standard/Safety, SDK/PDK? Safety, SDK

4323665 TensorRT runtime

What is the issue? The TensorRT safety runtime does not set the CUDA API mode by invoking the API cudaSafeEXSelectAPIMode() at the initialization state.

How does it impact the customer? The initialization stage of the TensorRT safety runtime does not prevent ASIL-D applications from using the TensorRT safety runtime. When this is fixed in the next release, applications that set the CUDA API mode as ASIL-D will not be able to use the TensorRT safety runtime.

When can we expect the fix? The bug will be fixed by the next release.

Is it for Standard/Safety, SDK/PDK? Safety, SDK

4350817 TensorRT runtime

What is the issue? Some networks containing the softmax layer may fail with SafeCaskError when switching to the Operational State using NvDVMS (DRIVE OS VM State Management), which helps to verify DOS_RES_107.

How does it impact the customer? For some networks containing softmax, the customer may not be able to switch to the Operational State using NvDVMS.

If there is a workaround, what is it? Refrain from using NvDVMS for networks that contain the softmax layer.

When can we expect the fix? The bug will be fixed by the next release.

Is it for Standard/Safety, SDK/PDK? Safety, SDK

4369190 TensorRT safety samples

What is the issue? The sample sampleSafeINT8 cannot run on the safety runtime due to a bug in the inference phase.

How does it impact the customer? The customer cannot run sampleSafeINT8 on the safety runtime, only the proxy runtime.

When can we expect the fix? This will be fixed in the next TensorRT release.

Is it for Standard/Safety, SDK/PDK? Safety, SDK

7. TensorRT Release Properties

The following table describes the release properties and software versions.
Table 4. TensorRT Release Properties
  Linux x86-64 Linux AArch64 QNX AArch64
QNX Safety QNX Standard
Supported NVIDIA CUDA® versions 11.4.28 11.4.28 11.4.28 11.4.28
Supported NVIDIA cuDNN versions 8.9.2 8.9.2 No 8.9.2
TensorRT Python API Yes Yes No No
NvOnnxParser Yes Yes No Yes
Note: With the exception of QNX safety, which requires engines to be built and serialized on QNX standard, serialized engines are not generally portable across platforms or TensorRT versions. In the standard runtime, version numbers must match (in major, minor, patch, and build) for the previously generated serialized engine to be minimally compatible. For more information, refer to the NVIDIA TensorRT 8.6.12 Safety Developer Guide Supplement for DRIVE OS. In the NVIDIA TensorRT 8.6.12 safety runtime, version numbers for major, minor, and patch must be equal to the runtime version numbers, and equal to 8.6.12.

7.1. Hardware Precision

The following table lists NVIDIA hardware and which precision modes each hardware supports. It also lists availability of Deep Learning Accelerator (DLA) on this hardware. For standard runtime, TensorRT supports SM 7.x or SM 8.x. For proxy runtime, TensorRT supports all hardware with capability of 8.x. For safety runtime, TensorRT supports hardware with capability of 8.7.
For more information, refer to the FAQ section in the NVIDIA TensorRT 8.6.12 Developer Guide for DRIVE OS.
Table 5. Hardware and Precision Support for TensorRT 8.6.12
CUDA Compute Capability Example Device TF32 FP32 FP16 INT8 FP16 Tensor Cores INT8 Tensor Cores DLA
8.7 NVIDIA Orin

No (TensorRT safe)

Yes (TensorRT standard)

Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
8.6 NVIDIA A10 Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No
8.0 NVIDIA PG199 Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No

7.2. Software Versions Per Platform

Table 6. Software Versions per Platform for TensorRT 8.6.12
Platform Compiler Version Python Version
Ubuntu 20.04 x86-64 gcc 9.3.0 3.8
Ubuntu 20.04 AArch64 gcc 9.3.0 3.8
QNX AArch64 QNX 7.1.0 Q++ 8.3.0 N/A

7.3. Compatibility

TensorRT 8.6.12 has been tested with the following:

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