COSMOTOP: Monitor Your NPU, GPU, Docker Containers, and System Resources

I’ve been using btop for system monitoring for a long time. It’s an excellent terminal-based resource monitor for tracking CPU, memory, disks, and processes. However, when working with Rockchip RK3576 and RK3588 platforms, one important metric was missing: NPU utilization.

While looking for an alternative, I came across COSMOTOP. It is a fork of btop built using Cosmopolitan Libc, extending the familiar interface with support for modern hardware and workloads. In addition to monitoring CPU, memory, disks, and processes, COSMOTOP can display Rockchip NPU usage, GPU utilization, Docker container statistics, and other system information in a single terminal interface.

If you’re developing or deploying AI applications on RK3576 or RK3588, COSMOTOP is a useful tool for monitoring overall system performance and ensuring your NPU workloads are running as expected.

Installation#

1. Download the binary#

Download the v0.15.2 release to a directory in your PATH, such as /usr/local/bin:

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sudo wget -O /usr/local/bin/cosmotop \
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  https://github.com/bjia56/cosmotop/releases/download/v0.15.2/cosmotop

2. Make it executable#

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sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/cosmotop

3. Run COSMOTOP#

For standard system monitoring:

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cosmotop

To enable Rockchip NPU monitoring, run it with root privileges:

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sudo cosmotop

COSMOTOP monitoring CPU, memory, GPU, Docker, and Rockchip NPU utilization

That’s it! You now have a lightweight yet powerful terminal monitor capable of displaying CPU, memory, GPU, Docker, and Rockchip NPU utilization in real time.