Configuring TensorRT for Cross Compilation with CMake

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First things first: what is TensorRT? It’s an open-source library from NVIDIA that optimizes deep neural networks for high performance on GPUs and other accelerators. And if you want to use it with CMake, well… let me just say that the process can be a bit of a headache.

But don’t freak out! I’m here to guide you through the steps, one by one. First, make sure you have all the necessary tools installed on your system: CMake (obviously), NVIDIA’s CUDA toolkit, and TensorRT itself. If you don’t already have these things set up, now would be a good time to do that.

Next, create a new directory for your project and navigate into it using the terminal or command prompt. Then, run this command:

# This script is used to set up the necessary dependencies for TensorRT.
# It requires CMake, NVIDIA's CUDA toolkit, and TensorRT itself to be installed on the system.

# First, navigate to the desired project directory.
mkdir project
cd project

# Then, run the following command to set up the dependencies.
cmake -D CUDA_TOOLKIT_ROOT_DIR=/path/to/cuda \ # Specifies the path to CUDA toolkit.
      -D CUDNN_INSTALL_DIR=/path/to/cudnn \ # Specifies the path to CUDNN.
      -D ENABLE_CUDA=ON \ # Enables CUDA support.
      -D BUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF \ # Builds static libraries instead of shared libraries.
      -D INSTALL_PYTHON_PACKAGE=OFF \ # Disables installation of Python package.
      .. # Specifies the path to the project directory.

This command tells CMake where to find your CUDA and cuDNN installations, enables support for CUDA (duh), disables shared libraries (because we don’t need them for this project), and turns off the Python package installation. The `..` at the end is just telling CMake that you want to configure a directory one level up from your current location in other words, wherever your TensorRT source code lives.

Now, run:

# This script is used to compile the project using make command with 8 threads.
# The -j flag specifies the number of threads to be used for compilation.

make -j8 # Corrected command to compile the project using 8 threads.

This command tells Make to build the project using 8 threads (you can adjust this number as needed). If everything goes according to plan, you should see a bunch of output scrolling by in your terminal or command prompt. And if it doesn’t go according to plan… well, let’s just say that debugging CMake issues is not my favorite pastime.

But hey at least we made it this far! If you want to learn more about TensorRT and how to use it with CMake (and other tools), I highly recommend checking out the official documentation. And if you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them in the comments section below. Later!

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