How to run Qdrant on a Raspberry Pi 5 (16 KB memory pages)¶

Qdrant's prebuilt aarch64 binary is a musl build, and its bundled jemalloc is compiled for 4 KB memory pages. The Raspberry Pi 5's default kernel (kernel_2712.img) uses 16 KB pages, so the Qdrant binary aborts immediately:

<jemalloc>: Unsupported system page size
memory allocation of 144 bytes failed
... process ... killed, signal SIGABRT

There is no aarch64 gnu build to fall back to — Qdrant ships aarch64 only as -musl, so switching download variants doesn't help.

Confirm it's the page size¶

getconf PAGE_SIZE      # 16384 on a stock Pi 5; Qdrant needs 4096
uname -r               # ...-rpi-2712 = the 16 KB Pi 5 kernel

Fix: boot the 4 KB-page kernel¶

The Pi 5 firmware ships both kernels; force the 4 KB one (kernel8.img). Add this under the [all] section of /boot/firmware/config.txt:

kernel=kernel8.img

Reboot and verify:

sudo reboot
# after it returns:
getconf PAGE_SIZE      # 4096  -> Qdrant now starts

Almost everything else (Python, most C programs) is page-size agnostic, so the switch is safe; the 16 KB kernel is mainly a throughput optimisation.

Detect it early in an installer

If you script the deployment, fail fast instead of dying at Qdrant:

if [ "$(uname -m)" = aarch64 ] && [ "$(getconf PAGE_SIZE)" != 4096 ]; then
  echo "Add 'kernel=kernel8.img' to /boot/firmware/config.txt and reboot."; exit 1
fi

If you must keep 16 KB pages

Run Qdrant from its multi-arch Docker image (which handles the page size), or run it on another host and point clients at it over the network. Building Qdrant from source against the system allocator also works but is heavy on a Pi.