Verify Your Setup
Run these checks to confirm your hardware, driver, and SDK are working correctly.
Make sure you have activated your environment:
source venv/bin/activate
Step 1: Check that the system sees the hardware
lspci | grep Axelera
Expected output (example for a single PCIe card):
01:00.0 Processing accelerators: Axelera AI, Inc. Metis (rev 01)
If no output appears:
- Verify the card is physically seated correctly
- Check that the power supply meets the requirements
- Restart the system and try again
Step 2: Check the device with axdevice
axdevice
Expected output (format varies by SDK version):
Device 0: metis-0:1:0 4GiB pcie flver=1.3.0 bcver=1.4 clock=800MHz(0-3:800MHz) mvm=0-3:100%
The key information: device index, name (PCIe bus address), memory, connection type, firmware version (flver), and clock speed. If multiple devices are installed, each appears on its own line.
If axdevice is not found, your environment is not activated. Run source venv/bin/activate and try again.
Step 3: Run a test inference
This runs a quick object detection on a sample video to verify the full stack — driver, runtime, compiler, and device. inference.py is the SDK's main command-line tool for running models:
./inference.py yolov5s-v7-coco media/traffic1_1080p.mp4 --no-display
The first run compiles the model for your hardware. This takes a few minutes and shows a progress bar. Subsequent runs start immediately.
To skip compilation, you can pre-download a compiled model:
axdownloadmodel yolov5s-v7-coco
Expected output:
[INFO] Building pipeline...
[INFO] Compiling model yolov5s-v7-coco...
████████████████████████████████████████ 100%
[INFO] Running inference...
[INFO] Processed 900 frames
[INFO] System throughput: XX.X FPS
[INFO] Device throughput: XX.X FPS
If this completes without errors, your setup is fully working.
Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Likely cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
lspci shows nothing | Card not seated or powered | Reseat card, check power, reboot |
axdevice not found | Environment not activated | source venv/bin/activate |
axdevice finds 0 devices | Driver not loaded | Re-run ./install.sh --all |
| Inference fails at compilation | SDK/firmware mismatch | Check versions match with axdevice |
| Permission denied errors | Need sudo for driver access | Check group membership or run installer again |
Setup complete
Your Metis hardware is installed, the SDK is working, and inference runs successfully.
Proceed to First Inference to start working with models.