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Raspberry Pi 5

The EdgeFirst Profiler runs on the Raspberry Pi 5 (aarch64). The CPU baseline uses ONNX Runtime; optional accelerators include the Hailo-8L M.2 module — the same M.2 form factor Raspberry Pi's AI Kit ships with — accessed through HailoRT.

For a guided platform tour see the Raspberry Pi Quick Start. This page covers only the profiler-specific setup.

Prerequisites

  • Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit (Bookworm or later)
  • libonnxruntime.so (sudo apt install libonnxruntime or pip install onnxruntime)
  • For the Hailo accelerator: HailoRT installed and libhailort.so on the loader path — see the Hailo install guide

Install the profiler

pip install edgefirst-profiler

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

Confirm:

edgefirst-profiler --version

CPU baseline (ONNX Runtime)

The default --provider cpu is the most predictable baseline. CPU inference on the RPi5 makes the decode and preprocess stages a meaningful fraction of total wall time — the Studio trace view will show whether the bottleneck is the model or the pipeline around it.

Hailo-8 / 8L accelerator

When a Hailo M.2 module is present and HailoRT is installed, the profiler routes compiled .hef files through the Hailo backend automatically. The Hailo backend is described in detail on the Hailo install page, including the libhailort_profiler shim that exposes per-context timing.

Thermal considerations

The RPi5 will throttle under sustained inference if the SoC reaches ~85 °C. The profiler samples thermal-zone temperatures and reports them as system-metric counters; if the temperature climbs steadily during a long run, look at the per-iteration latency in the dashboard — a sudden bump usually corresponds to a thermal throttle event.

A small heatsink and fan is enough to keep the SoC out of throttle territory during validation runs.

Verifying the install

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

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