Release Notes#

PVA SDK v2.8.0#

PVA SDK 2.8 is a feature release which adds support for improved internal driver APIs and various new runtime features, described in these release notes.

Supported Platforms and Devices#

Host#

The PVA SDK is designed for cross-compilation from an x86-64 host development environment. Supported host operating systems for this release are:

  • Ubuntu 22.04

  • Ubuntu 24.04

The PVA SDK may be used on a supported OS installation or via Docker. Refer to Installation and PVA SDK samples for more details on host setup and dependencies.

Targets#

Supported targets are:

  • DRIVE OS 6.5 or greater

  • JetPack 6.0 or greater

  • Native x86

  • Simulator

PVA Architectures#

This release of PVA SDK supports Orin and Thor PVA architectures.

New Features#

Runtime API Features#

  • Added cupva::Error::DataFlowActiveAfterVpuExit to indicate that DataFlows were active after VPU exited.

  • The cuPVA runtime now internally uses a more efficient command submission mechanism. This allows for better VPU utilization and better performance.

  • cupva::Context::finalize() now throws an exception if user-allocated or user-mapped memory was not explicitly freed. This helps users identify and address potential memory leaks.

Deprecations and Compatibility#

  • Clarified that cupva::Fence::wait() may only be called on Fences which are signaled by PVA. For externally signaled fences imported from NvSciSync, use NvSciSync APIs instead.

Bug Fixes#

The following bugs are resolved with this release.

Reference

Description

Fix information

Affected platforms

PVAAS-21064

VPU Symbol type checking not enabled in Native builds.

Fixed

Native

PVAAS-21363

Context was not being destroyed correctly, leading to applications crashing on exit when using CUDA memory.

Fixed

Orin and Thor

PVAAS-21373

Finalizing cupva::Context after using CUDA memory with driver version 2006 was incorrectly throwing an exception. Destroying such a Context would cause spurious error messages.

Fixed

Orin and Thor

Known Issues#

This release contains the following known issues:

Reference

Description

Suggested workaround

Projected closure

PVAAS-16827

When linking StaticDataFlows with constant padding, the constant value must be the same even if px/py are both zero for one of the dataflows. Failure to do so leads to Dataflow compilation failing.

Use the same constant value in these cases.

Not planned

PVAAS-12732

A StaticDataFlow specifying VMEM->VMEM transfer cannot be linked to a StaticDataFlow specifying DRAM->VMEM transfer.

Use unlinked DataFlows for these cases.

Not planned

PVAAS-6633

NvSci APIs and CUDA interoperability are not supported for native.

Decouple interop from execution to allow testing kernels in isolation in native.

Not planned

PVAAS-16828

Multiple cupva::RasterDataFlow sharing the same handler and configured with different PadModeType can lead to incorrect values in tile padding.

Use separate handlers for such cases.

Not planned

PVAAS-16829

Chess compiler may optimize away some VMEM store instructions when calling dataflow Open/Update and Trig APIs back to back, leading to data corruption.

Insert a chess_memory_fence() between Open and Trig APIs.

Future feature release

PVAAS-17465

When using a single UnifiedRDFHandler for multiple tile buffers in circular buffer mode, only the tilebuffer specified to cupvaRasterDataFlowOpen() will have its tail properly copied.

Explicitly copy 64B of secondary tilebuffers using cupvaCircularBufferMemcpy().

Future feature release

PVAAS-21339

CUDA interoperability tutorial build fails with cmake lesser than 3.22 while using CUDA sbsa package

Use cmake version 3.28 or higher.

Future feature release

This release contains the following known issues for internal users.

Reference

Description

Suggested workaround

Projected closure

PVAAS-16830

The simulator backend does not support individual buffers larger than 4GB.

Do not allocate large buffers when using SIM

Not planned

PVAAS-6633

NvSci APIs and CUDA interoperability are not supported for sim.

As above.

Not planned