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Kinara Ara240

The EdgeFirst Profiler runs Kinara Ara240 DVM models on Linux (x86_64 or aarch64) hosts that have the Kinara stack installed. The Ara240 inference path is daemon-based: the profiler talks to the ara2-proxy daemon over its IPC channel, the daemon owns the device and runs inference.

Prerequisites

  • Kinara Ara240 hardware (PCIe card or USB module)
  • Kinara SDK with the ara2-proxy daemon and Kinara drivers
  • ara2-proxy running as a system service (started automatically by the Kinara SDK installer in most cases)
systemctl status ara2-proxy    # should be active (running)

Install the profiler

pip install edgefirst-profiler

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/EdgeFirstAI/profiler-cli/main/install.sh | bash

Confirm:

edgefirst-profiler --version

Backend routing

.dvm files are detected automatically and routed to the Ara240 backend when a validation session runs. The Kinara daemon owns the device, so the profiler reports device-side sub-phase timing (input_copy, invoke, output_copy) along with the host-measured roundtrip. When the device-reported sub-phases do not sum to roundtrip, the gap reveals host-side overhead — IPC latency between the profiler and ara2-proxy, or driver setup time.

The Ara240 backend keeps up to 8 inference slots in flight concurrently; this is the auto-selected default and is the setting at which the profiler approaches the NPU throughput ceiling. On i.MX 95 — where the Ara240 is accessed over PCIe from the Cortex-A core — the ceiling is model-specific: approximately 194 FPS for YOLOv5n and 249 FPS for YOLOv8n at 640×640 input resolution.

The Perfetto trace now exposes per-frame NPU tracks: npu.h2d (PCIe host-to-device transfer), npu.compute (NPU execution), and npu.d2h (PCIe device-to-host transfer). This replaces the previous aggregate timing and lets you see precisely where each inference frame spends its time.

Model metadata

DVM files use a zip trailer to embed decoder configuration and class labels. When the trailer is missing or the model was produced by a toolchain that does not write it, the profiler runs in timing-only mode and prints a note on stderr.

Verifying the install

edgefirst-profiler login
edgefirst-profiler              # opens TUI on F1 Help

If the ara2-proxy daemon is not running when a session starts, the profiler returns an error pointing at the daemon — not a connection-refused traceback. Restart the daemon:

sudo systemctl restart ara2-proxy

Then run a validation session — see Validation from Studio or Validation from the Profiler.