System Throttled due to Overcurrent in Xavier NX

Hi,

We are working on a Xavier NX carrier board. The details are given below:

L4T version : 32.7.1
nvp mode : 20W 6-core
crit_current_limit_0 : 5000mA

We use an application to sample frames from GMSL cameras and encode them. While running the application, we get the “System Throttled due to Over-current” notification and the below print in the dmesg.

[487902.664182] soctherm: OC ALARM 0x00000001
[487904.074587] soctherm: OC ALARM 0x00000001

Here is the output of the jtop command:

As per the data from jtop the overall power usage is around 15-16W only and it is much lower than the 20W power mode that we are using.

Also, strangely the occurrence of the issue reduces while running in 20W, 4-core mode. But the CPU usage is extremely high in this mode, and it is not suitable for our use case.

We tried setting custom power mode profile in 20W,6-core mode by reducing the nvenc frequency to 499MHz and all CPU frequency to 1.3GHz. Even in this configuration we are facing the issue.

Is there a way to overcome this issue.

Could you provide the command to to sample frames from cameras and encode.

@ShaneCCC, Thanks for your response.

It’s not direct gstreamer commands. We are using custom application based on OpenCV which grabs frames from 4x GMSL cameras and post process frame (i.e., scaling and stitching).

Our assumption is OC warning should be triggered when overall Xavier NX power consumption is greater than or equal to 5000mA (crit_current_limit_0). As you can see jtop result, the power consumption of NX is only around 15W (i.e., power mode set to 20W) and current limit is not crossed.

Questions:

  1. Why OC warnings triggered when NVENC block alone stressed to max operating frequency?
  2. Is there any known limitation with respect to NVENC max frequency operation?
  3. Is that fine to disable OC warnings and ignore this warning with above CPU & GPU consumption level?

Kindly let us know your recommendation. It’s critical factor to decide Xavier NX SOM performance for our use case.

Hi,

There are some misunderstanding here.

The “5000 mA” limitation is also there on 32.7.x. And you may not able to observe by jtop because the over current warning would come up if a sudden over current situation happened. Which means jtop is not able to observe it as the sampling period is not fast enough.

Thanks for quick response. I understand jtop may not be able to pick sudden changes in over current situation.

Can you explain more about “The “5000 mA” limitation is also there on 32.7.x” this point?

I will try to check any abnormality in input 5V power source of NX SOM during OC warning scenario and let you know.

Can you give your comments for below question,

  1. Is that fine to disable OC warnings and ignore this warning with above CPU & GPU consumption level?

Can you explain more about “The “5000 mA” limitation is also there on 32.7.x” this point?

Oh ok. If you are not asking about this question, please ignore my comment.

Is that fine to disable OC warnings and ignore this warning with above CPU & GPU consumption level?

It is not just a warning. It will indeed throttle your system because your usecase has exceed the hardware limitation of xavier NX.

Please see my explanation on this old topic.

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