JetPack SDK 4.6 Release Page

OS

NVIDIA L4T provides the bootloader, Linux kernel 4.9, necessary firmwares, NVIDIA drivers, sample filesystem based on Ubuntu 18.04, and more.

JetPack 4.6 includes L4T 32.6.1 with these highlights:

• Support for Jetson AGX Xavier Industrial module.
• Support for new 20W mode on Jetson Xavier NX enabling better video encode and video decode performance and higher memory bandwidth. The included 10W and 15W nvpmodel configurations will perform exactly as did the 10W and 20W modes with previous JetPack releases. Any custom nvpmodel created with a previous release will require regeneration for use with JetPack 4.6. Please read release notes for details.
• Image based Over-The-Air update tools for developing end-to-end OTA solution for Jetson products in the field. Supported on Jetson TX2 series, Jetson Xavier NX and Jetson AGX Xavier series. Download the OTA tools from the L4T page under the Tools section.
• 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. Supported on Jetson TX2 series, Jetson Xavier NX and Jetson AGX Xavier series.
• A new flashing tool to flash internal or external media connected to Jetson¹. Supports Jetson TX2 series, Jetson Xavier NX and Jetson AGX Xavier. The new tool uses initial RAM disk for flashing and is up to1.5x faster when flashing compared to the previous method².
• Secure boot is enhanced³ for Jetson TX2 series to extend encryption support to kernel, kernel-dtb and initrd.
• Disk encryption of external media⁴ 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 for Raspberry-PI IMX219 or Raspberry-PI High Def IMX477 at run time using Jetson-IO tool on Jetson Nano 2GB, Jetson Nano and Jetson Xavier NX developer kits.
• Direct downloadable links to JetPack and L4T debian packages for Jetson



¹Flashing from NFS is deprecated and replaced by the new flashing tool which uses initrd

²Flashing performance test was done on Jetson Xavier NX production module

³Secure boot enhancement to encrypt kernel, kernel-dtb and initrd was supported on Jetson Xavier NX and Jetson AGX Xavier series in JetPack 4.5.

⁴Support for encrypting internal media like emmc, was added in JetPack 4.5

TensorRT

TensorRT is a high performance deep learning inference runtime for image classification, segmentation, and object detection neural networks. TensorRT is built on CUDA, NVIDIA’s parallel programming model, and enables you to optimize inference for all deep learning frameworks. It includes a deep learning inference optimizer and runtime that delivers low latency and high-throughput for deep learning inference applications.

JetPack 4.6 includes TensorRT 8.0.1

cuDNN

CUDA Deep Neural Network library provides high-performance primitives for deep learning frameworks. It provides highly tuned implementations for standard routines such as forward and backward convolution, pooling, normalization, and activation layers.

JetPack 4.6 includes cuDNN 8.2.1

CUDA

CUDA Toolkit provides a comprehensive development environment for C and C++ developers building GPU-accelerated applications. The toolkit includes a compiler for NVIDIA GPUs, math libraries, and tools for debugging and optimizing the performance of your applications.

JetPack 4.6 includes CUDA 10.2

Multimedia API

The Jetson Multimedia API package provides low level APIs for flexible application development.

Camera application API: libargus offers a low-level frame-synchronous API for camera applications, with per frame camera parameter control, multiple (including synchronized) camera support, and EGL stream outputs. RAW output CSI cameras needing ISP can be used with either libargus or GStreamer plugin. In either case, the V4L2 media-controller sensor driver API is used.

Sensor driver API: V4L2 API enables video decode, encode, format conversion and scaling functionality. V4L2 for encode opens up many features like bit rate control, quality presets, low latency encode, temporal tradeoff, motion vector maps, and more.

JetPack 4.6 includes following highlights in multimedia:

• Support for Scalable Video Coding (SVC) H.264 encoding
• Support for YUV444 8, 10 bit encoding and decoding

Computer Vision

VPI (Vision Programing Interface) is a software library that provides Computer Vision / Image Processing algorithms implemented on PVA¹ (Programmable Vision Accelerator), GPU and CPU

OpenCV is a leading open source library for computer vision, image processing and machine learning.

VisionWorks² is a software development package for Computer Vision (CV) and image processing.

JetPack 4.6 includes VPI 1.1

• New algorithms
  • Optical Flow
  • Laplacian Pyramid
  • Image Histogram
  • Histogram Equalization
  • Background Subtraction
• Developer preview of Python binding

JetPack 4.6 includes OpenCV 4.1.1

Jetpack 4.6 includes Visionworks 1.6

Developer Tools

CUDA Toolkit provides a comprehensive development environment for C and C++ developers building high-performance GPU-accelerated applications with CUDA libraries. The toolkit includes Nsight Eclipse Edition, debugging and profiling tools including Nsight Compute, and a toolchain for cross-compiling applications.

NVIDIA Nsight Systems is a low overhead system-wide profiling tool, providing the insights developers need to analyze and optimize software performance.

NVIDIA Nsight Graphics is a standalone application for debugging and profiling graphics applications.

JetPack 4.6 includes NVIDIA Nsight Systems 2021.2

JetPack 4.6 includes NVIDIA Nsight Graphics 2021.2

Refer to release notes for more details.

Supported SDKs and Tools

Deepstream SDK is a complete analytics toolkit for AI-based multi-sensor processing and video and audio understanding.

The next version of NVIDIA DeepStream SDK 6.0 will support JetPack 4.6

NVIDIA Triton™ Inference Server simplifies deployment of AI models at scale. Triton Inference Server is open source and supports deployment of trained AI models from NVIDIA TensorRT, TensorFlow and ONNX Runtime on Jetson. On Jetson, Triton Inference Server is provided as a shared library for direct integration with C API.

NVIDIA Triton Inference Server Release 21.07 supports JetPack 4.6

PowerEstimator is a webapp that simplifies creation of custom power mode profiles and estimates Jetson module power consumption.

PowerEstimator v1.1 supports JetPack 4.6.

Cloud Native

Jetson brings Cloud-Native to the edge and enables technologies like containers and container orchestration. NVIDIA JetPack includes NVIDIA Container Runtime with Docker integration, enabling GPU accelerated containerized applications on Jetson platform.

NVIDIA hosts several container images for Jetson on Nvidia NGC. Some are suitable for software development with samples and documentation and others are suitable for production software deployment, containing only runtime components. Find more information and a list of all container images at the Cloud-Native on Jetson page.

JetPack 4.6 highlights include:

New CUDA runtime and TensorRT runtime container images 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 containerize AI applications for deployment. Note that the L4T-base container continues to support existing containerized applications that expect it to mount CUDA and TensorRT components from the host.