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Hailo-8 / Hailo-8L

The EdgeFirst Profiler runs compiled Hailo Executable Format (.hef) models on any Linux host with HailoRT installed and a Hailo accelerator present. Common targets include the Raspberry Pi 5 AI Kit (Hailo-8L via M.2), M.2 carriers on x86 hosts, and PCIe Hailo-8 cards.

Prerequisites

  • HailoRT 4.x runtime installed (libhailort.so on the loader path)
  • Hailo PCIe driver (hailo_pci) and udev rules — installed by the HailoRT Debian packages
hailortcli scan   # should print the device, e.g. "Hailo-8L on PCIe slot ..."

If hailortcli scan reports no devices, fix the HailoRT install before running the profiler — the profiler depends on the same libhailort.so symbols.

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

The Hailo backend dlopens libhailort.so at runtime. As with every other backend, a missing library produces a clear error message naming the file — no dlopen traceback.

Per-context timing (libhailort_profiler.so)

For per-context lifecycle timing — configure, activate, infer, deactivate — the profiler can load an optional Hailo profiler shim, libhailort_profiler.so, that wraps HailoRT lifecycle calls. The shim ships in the EdgeFirst SDK and is loaded automatically when present in /usr/local/lib or /usr/lib.

The Hailo per-context timing appears alongside the rest of the trace in the Studio trace view. Without the shim the profiler still reports end-to-end inference timing, only the lifecycle breakdown is unavailable.

Multi-device hosts

hailortcli scan lists every device on the host. The profiler currently selects the first available device. For multi-device benchmarking, schedule the validation sessions serially or pin each run to a specific device through HailoRT's environment variables.

Verifying the install

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

If a validation session fails with "device busy", another process holds the Hailo device. Stop the holder (hailortcli, another edgefirst-profiler, an application using HailoRT) and rerun.