Peripherals and Device Profiles

How to ensure physically-attached peripherals (via, e.g., USB or serial interface) can be made available to containers launched on the device.

By default, the testbed will auto-discover most devices available under /dev. Currently this works against a list of known/allowed device names, which differs by platform:

Device platform	Linux device patterns
Raspberry Pi	^snd$ ^gpiomem$ ^gpiochip[0-9]*$ ^hci[0-9]*$ ^i2c-[0-9]*$ ^rtc0$ ^video[0-9]*$ ^vchiq$ ^vcsm.*$ ^ttyUSB[0-9]*$ ^ttyACM[0-9]*$ ^ttyTHS[0-9]*$ ^ttyS[0-9]*$
NVIDIA Jetson	^snd$ ^gpiomem$ ^gpiochip[0-9]*$ ^hci[0-9]*$ ^i2c-[0-9]*$ ^rtc0$ ^video[0-9]*$ ^vchiq$ ^vcsm.*$ ^ttyUSB[0-9]*$ ^ttyACM[0-9]*$ ^ttyTHS[0-9]*$ ^ttyS[0-9]*$ nvidia-gpu

When launching a container on the testbed, end-users can specify a "device profile", which maps to some set of detected and available devices. The containers will then have permission to access these devices.

Sometimes, peripherals require additional software for interfacing. This is not automatically provided by the testbed, but can be preinstalled inside the containers that are launched on the target device. For example, Raspberry Pi userland binaries such as vcgemcmd could be compiled and added to the Docker image.

Device Profiles

For security reasons, we currently whitelist device profiles, which map a subset of the above devices to a key that can be specified during container launch.

The currently defined profiles are as follows:

Key	Mapped Devices
jetson_camera	/dev/video0
pi_camera	/dev/video0, /dev/vchiq, /dev/vcsm-cma
pi_gpio	/dev/gpiomem
pi_serial	/dev/ttyACM0
pi_meter	/dev/ttyUSB0
pi_i2c_1	/dev/i2c-1