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Frigate NVR with Coral TPU & iGPU passthrough using ESXi on Intel NUC

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For the past couple of weeks, I have been investigating some issues reported by the community when using ESXi with the popular Google Coral Edge TPU for accelerating machine learning (ML) inferencing. Fortunately, with the help from one of our engineers, Songtao, we were able to find a solution! You can find the complete write-up HERE and it also works with the latest ESXi 8.0 Update 1 release.

I was actually surprised at how popular the combination of the Google TPU and ESXi was from the community, which I guess should not come as a surprise, especially with the capabilities of ESXi coupled with all the interests in AI/ML these days.


Another popular use case of the Google TPU, which I had recently learned about is for real-time AI object detection using the Frigate NVR (Network Video Recorder) software, which is a commonly deployed solution that enable various home security and automation capabilities.

In fact, during a conversation with my buddy Alan Renouf, who is a Product Manager focused on running modern Edge workloads and is also a Frigate user, I discovered that the Frigate stack, which encompasses inferencing, video decoding, and the integration of cameras and sensors, closely resembles the components that you would find in many Edge deployments with simliar set of use cases.

Funny enough, I ended up leveraging a lot of my existing work with running ESXi on Intel NUCs and iGPU passthrough, while learning about and setting up Frigate! This was definitely an interesting project to explore and as shared, I now have a complete working setup with the full setup and write-up below.

JFYI - I have already submitted a PR 6576 to update the Frigate ESXi documentation as it is severely out of date and help folks quickly find the latest setup instructions.

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ESXi on Intel NUC 13 Pro (Arena Canyon)

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A new year means a new Intel NUC with the latest generation of processors from Intel.


Today, Intel has launched the new Intel NUC 13 Pro, previously codenamed Arena Canyon NUC, which incorporates the latest Intel 13th Generation Raptor Lake CPU mobile processors and delivering that in the classic 4x4 Intel NUC form factor that many in the VMware community are quite familiar with.

At first glance, the Intel NUC 13 Pro looks exactly the same as the previous Intel NUC 12 Pro generation. In fact, the only visible difference on the outside between the 12th and 13th Generation Intel NUC Pro is that the Intel NUC 13 now has a new etched Intel NUC logo that is located on the top of the case on the lower left as shown in the screenshot above. Obviously, the changes with the Intel NUC 13 Pro is from within, so lets now take a closer look at the newest Intel NUC Pro and what it has to offer from a VMware Homelab perspective.

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How to disable the Efficiency Cores (E-cores) on an Intel NUC?

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The Intel 12th Generation (Alder Lake) CPU is the first Intel consumer CPU that introduces a new hybrid big.LITTLE CPU architecture. This new hybrid Intel CPU architecture integrates two types of CPU cores: Performance-cores (P-cores) and Efficiency-cores (E-cores) into the same physical CPU die. For more information about this new hybrid Intel CPU design, check out this resource HERE.

These new hybrid Intel CPUs have also become the defacto standard for the Intel NUCs starting with the 12th Generation Intel NUCs (Dragon Canyon, Wall Street Canyon & Serprent Canyon), which were released last year. While the ESXi scheduler does not support or understand this new consumer CPU architecture, it can function with ESXi but does require an ESXi kernel boot option, which I have documented HERE, that tells ESXi to ignore the CPU differences.

While this has been an acceptable workaround, there are no guarantees on how the ESXi scheduler will behave. Furthermore, you will also not benefit from Hyper-threading (HT) on the P-cores as the E-cores do not contain HT-enabled cores and hence HT is also disabled by ESXi. A slightly better workaround is to actually disable the E-cores, which would give you uniform CPU P-cores and also access to HT. During my initial investigation, I was never able to figure out how to disable the E-cores within the Intel NUC BIOs and I had assumed it was just not possible.

I recently had re-inquired about this configuration change and came to learn that it is possible to change both the P-core and E-core settings within the Intel NUC BIOs, it was just not very intuitive!

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