Build PaddlePaddle for Raspberry Pi

You may use any of the following two approaches to build the inference library of PaddlePaddle for Raspberry Pi:

  1. Build using SSH: Log in to a Raspberry Pi using SSH and build the library. The required development tools and third-party dependencies are listed in here: /Dockerfile.
  2. Cross-compile: We talk about how to cross-compile PaddlePaddle for Raspberry Pi on a Linux/x64 machine, in more detail in this article.

The Cross-Compiling Toolchain

Step 1. Clone the Github repo by running the following command.

git clone https://github.com/raspberrypi/tools.git

Step 2. Use the pre-built cross-compiler found in ./tools/tree/master/arm-bcm2708/gcc-linaro-arm-linux-gnueabihf-raspbian-x64. To run it on a Linux computer, glibc version >= 2.14 is needed.

CMake Arguments

CMake supports cross-compiling. All CMake configuration arguments required for the cross-compilation for Raspberry Pi can be found in cmake/cross_compiling/raspberry_pi.cmake.

Some important arguments that need to be set:

  • CMAKE_SYSTEM_NAME: The target platform. Must be RPi.
  • RPI_TOOLCHAIN: The absolute path of the cross-compiling toolchain.
  • RPI_ARM_NEON: Use ARM NEON Intrinsics. This is a required argument and set default to ON.
  • HOST_C/CXX_COMPILER: The C/C++ compiler for the host. It is used to build building tools running on the host, for example, protoc.

A commonly-used CMake configuration is as follows:

cmake -DCMAKE_SYSTEM_NAME=RPi \
      -DRPI_TOOLCHAIN=your/path/to/arm-bcm2708/gcc-linaro-arm-linux-gnueabihf-raspbian-x64 \
      -DRPI_ARM_NEON=ON \
      -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=your/path/to/install \
      -DWITH_GPU=OFF \
      -DWITH_C_API=ON \
      -DWITH_PYTHON=OFF \
      -DWITH_SWIG_PY=OFF \
      ..

To build the inference library, please set the argument WITH_C_API to ON: WITH_C_API=ON.

You can add more arguments. For example, to minimize the size of the generated inference library, you may use CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=MinSizeRel. For performance optimization, you may use CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release.

Build and Install

The following commands build the inference library of PaddlePaddle for Raspberry Pi and third-party dependencies.

make
make install

The intermediate files will be stored in build. Third-party libraries will be located in build/third_party. If you have already built it for other platforms like Android or iOS, you may want to clear these directories by running the command: rm -rf build.

The infernece library will be in your/path/to/install/lib, with related header files in your/path/to/install/include.