Installation and Configuration with a Virtual Machine

The Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute SDK (Intel® Movidius™ NCSDK) can be installed on a virtual machine. This allows you to run the NCSDK on an unsupported host OS and/or to keep the NCSDK installation isolated from your host system.

We have validated the installation with VirtualBox but other virtual machine products may also work with customization specific to that product.

General Requirements

  • VirtualBox (tested with 5.1.34 but other releases should work)
    • Extension Pack installed (this can be found on the VirtualBox downloads page for your version of VirtualBox)
  • Host OS (these have been tested, others may work):
    • OS X Yosemite 10.10.5
    • Windows 10
    • Ubuntu 16.04 Desktop
  • Guest OS:

Installation

Virtual Machine Creation

Use an existing Ubuntu virtual machine that meets installation requirements, or set up a new virtual machine with the following settings:

  • Name and operating system
    • Name: NCSDK (…or anything you like)
    • Type: Linux
    • Version: Ubuntu (64-bit)
  • Memory Size
    • 2048 MB or more (Caffe compilation will likely fail without at least 2GB of RAM)
  • Hard disk
    • Check “Create a virtual hard disk now”
  • Hard disk file type
    • Check “VDI (VirtualBox Disk Image)”
  • Storage on physical hard disk
    • Check “Fixed size”
  • File location and size
    • Use the default location or choose another.
    • 15.00+ GB

If necessary, download an Ubuntu 16.04 Desktop .iso image file on your host machine. Then, start the virtual machine and follow prompts to install Ubuntu 16.04.

USB Configuration

You must enable a USB 3.0 controller and create USB whitelist filters for the virtual machine. The USB 3.0 feature requires the VirtualBox Extension Pack.

  • Shut down the virtual machine
  • With the virtual machine selected on the VirtualBox Manager:
    • Open Settings -> USB
      • Check “Enable USB Controller”
      • Check “USB 3.0 (xHCI) Controller”
      • Add a new USB filter with Vendor ID: 03e7
        • The other filter fields can be blank.
      • Add a new USB filter with Vendor ID: 040e
        • The other filter fields can be blank.

Install the NCSDK

Start the virtual machine. In the virtual machine, follow Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute SDK Installation and Configuration directions to install the NCSDK.