Simplifying ROS 2 embedded flows with colcon extensions. - Githubissues

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ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group community governance model & list of projects

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Simplifying ROS 2 embedded flows with colcon extensions. #13

Closed vmayoral closed 3 years ago

vmayoral commented 3 years ago

An extension for colcon-core to include Hardware Acceleration capabilities and simplify acceleration flows. Initially targeting the following mechanisms:

[x] selection across embedded targets (capable/not-capable of doing hardware acceleration) easily
[x] list available embedded targets
[x] simplify configuring Linux kernel (provide at least two default configurations)
[x] simplify configuration of type 1 hypervisors (e.g. Xen)
[x] integrate emulation capabilities (to cope with the lack of hardware availability) directly in the colcon flows
[x] other utilities to manage embedded (mount, umount, extract ramdisks from raw disk images, etc.)

vmayoral commented 3 years ago

Contributed to 👍 https://github.com/ros-acceleration/colcon-acceleration and validated with KV260 official reference hardware platform:

Initial list of capabilities:

verb	quick peek	description
`select`		The `select` verb allows to easily select and configure a specific target firmware for hardware acceleration, and default to it while producing binaries and accelerators.
`list`		The `list` verb allows to inspect the acceleration firmware available in the ROS workspace, marking with a `*` the currently selected option.
`linux`		The `linux` verb helps configure the Linux kernel in the raw SD card image produced by the firmware. E.g. `colcon acceleration linux vanilla` will produce a Linux vanilla kernel, whereas `colcon acceleration linux preempt_rt` will instead use a pre-built kernel and kernel modules for improved determinism (fully preemptible kernel).
`hypervisor`		The `hypervisor` verb helps configure the Xen hypervisor in the raw SD card image produced by the firmware. E.g. `colcon acceleration hypervisor --dom0 vanilla --domU vanilla --dom0less preempt_rt` will produce a raw image leveraging Xen with 3 VMs. The first, `dom0`, uses a vanilla kernel. The second, `domU`, uses a vanilla kernel. The third is a `dom0less` VM and uses a fully preemtible kernel (preemt_rt). Unless otherwise specified, all VMs use the default ROS 2 configuration, PetaLinux-based rootfs, the LNS and an Ethernet link layer.
`emulation`		The `emulation` verb helps manage the emulation capabilities with QEMU open source machine emulator and virtualizer. This way, developers can test their setups and algorithms without the hardware, which facilitates testing and speeds up the development process allowing for CI/CD pipelines. Emulation boots the same SD card image produced by previous commands and including the ROS 2 development workspace, providing a unified development approach.
`platform`		The `platform` verb helps reports Vitis platform enabled in the firmware deployed in the ROS 2 workspace.
`mkinitramfs`		The `mkinitramfs` verb creates compressed cpio initramfs (ramdisks). These can then be used to back up the current rootfs or to create dom0less VMs in Xen easily.
`mount` / `umount`		The `mount` and `umount` verbs help mount/umount the raw SD card image produced by previous steps. This way, developers can easily access the embedded rootfs directly, across the various partitions of the raw image (e.g. as in the case of multi-VMs in Xen).