↓Skip to main content

How to install PCIe Coral TPU drivers in Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS Server

·494 words·3 mins
Coral Ubuntu
Author
Ignas Paškevičius
High school student who really likes making awesome stuff with computers
Table of Contents

Introduction
#

If you followed the official coral documentation , you will get error when installing the gasket-dkms package. That’s because it’s actually outdated, as well as the instructions of adding their repo to apt. Hence I wrote a this guide, I hope you will find it helpful!

Prerequisites
#

  • Installed Ubuntu 24.04.2 server . Debian server should be fine, but the 4th step of Installation section may need to be adjusted to your OS.
  • Installed PCIe Coral Edge TPU in a PCIe slot (A+E in my case)
  • If you have secure boot on, during installation you will get a dialog that will guide you on how to enroll new MOK keys to enable third-party drivers. You will need to reboot.
  • This is done on an amd64 computer, but not tested on a Raspberry Pi, YMMV.

Installation
#

Compiling gasket from source
#

The version linked in the official coral documentation doesn’t work on recent kernel versions. The updated version is available at gasket-driver repo , but has no pre-built packages there. This is where gasket-builder comes in:

This repository contains a Docker file to build the deb package to install on recent kernel versions, to avoid installing development dependencies on production servers.

  1. Make sure you have docker installed as per Docker documentation
  2. Clone git repo
git clone https://github.com/jnicolson/gasket-builder
  1. Move to gasket builder directory and start building. Use sudo if your user isn’t in the docker group.
cd gasket-builder
docker build --output . .
  1. If building succeeds, you should see gasket-dkms<version>.deb, where <version> is version of the driver.
ls

Installing .deb file from terminal
#

This is self-explanatory.

sudo apt install ./gasket-dkms<version>.deb

If you get “unsandboxed” error, you should still be fine to proceed. This is just a minor apt sandbox artifact (common when installing from home directories) but has no impact on functionality.

Adding Googles repository
#

Commands provided in the official docs give errors because it is outdated. Use these instead.

  1. Add repository with signed-by clause
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/coral.gpg] https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt coral-edgetpu-stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/coral-edgetpu.list
  1. Create keyrings directory if needed
sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings
  1. Download key
curl -fsSL https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/doc/apt-key.gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/coral.gpg
  1. Override Ubuntu’s package priority. This may be needed because Ubuntu’s repositories have older versions of the same packages. This creates a preferences file to prioritize Google’s repo.
echo "Package: *
Pin: origin packages.cloud.google.com
Pin-Priority: 1001" | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/coral-priority
  1. Update apt
sudo apt update

Installing the libedgetpu1-std
#

Installing from Google’s repository should work just fine. Just to make sure it comes from the right repository, we will use -t coral-edgetpu-stable flag.

sudo apt install -t coral-edgetpu-stable libedgetpu1-std

Verify functionality
#

If you don’t want to reboot your system, load modules manually with modprobe.

sudo modprobe gasket
sudo modprobe apex

Check if loaded.

lsmod | grep -E 'gasket|apex'

And final check.

ls /dev/apex_0

If you see /dev/apex_0 in the output, then you have successfully installed the driver and Edge TPU runtime.

Cover photo made by me.