Non-functional NPU Support on Dragon Q6A (QCS6490) under Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble)

[gilbertz]

Hey all!

After reading this and other posts, I was able to get both the GPU and NPU working on Armbian with the Radxa and Qualcomm repos installed. I posted the process on the following post:

Finally got Llama 3.2 1B running on the Dragon Q6A NPU (Armbian Ubuntu 24.04)

After spending the last few weeks exploring the QCS6490 AI stack, I finally managed to get Llama 3.2 1B running on the Hexagon NPU of the Radxa Dragon Q6A. Like many others here, I initially went down the QAIRT/QNN/QAI Hub/ExecuTorch rabbit hole. I tried multiple SDK versions, compiled binaries, Qualcomm AI Hub, official documentation, and even spun up a cloud machine just to verify I wasn’t doing something wrong. It turned out the ecosystem is much trickier to navigate than it first appears. T…