IIoT Edge Devices --> arm based Systems

[akrea]

Hi

First of all: THANK YOU providing this tool and the effort the contributors put into this.

When I checked on the Kura/Kapua combo, the most glaring missing piece I see is that there is no arm-based container version of Kura. In the industrial manufacturing environment we have a vast majority of edge devices which are arm based and run services as docker containers (currently moving from RPi4 (32bit) to i.MX 8M (64bit)).

My question here is: is there no arm-container-version due to resource constraints in the dev-team or do I miss an (obvious) reason why there is no arm-container-version?

I not familiar in coding for arm architecture nor do I have a lot of experience in creating Docker images. Though I'm willing to learn, try and if I succeed to share :-) If you could provide some starting guidance (and a rough estimate on how much time it would take you to do it - just to get an idea what I'm getting into) I would be delighted. PM if you prefer.

Again: Thank you!

[mattdibi]

Hello there @akrea, thanks for reaching out.

is there no arm-container-version due to resource constraints in the dev-team or do I miss an (obvious) reason why there is no arm-container-version?

It's mainly a resource constraint issue. We already have all the pieces (i.e. we already support Kura on ARM devices natively) we just need to package them into a container.

The other constraint I see is related to the Jenkins pipeline responsible for building Kura: it's x86-64 only and we would need some changes to support ARM Docker images builds 🤔

If you could provide some starting guidance (and a rough estimate on how much time it would take you to do it - just to get an idea what I'm getting into) I would be delighted. PM if you prefer.

I think @GregoryIvo can help you with this. He's responsible for the latest changes in that department and can provide some useful info.

[GregoryIvo]

I think it would be really neat to have container support for different architectures, and think this would be very achievable 😄

I personally would love to see this support! 🚀 🌕

---

How our build system for containers works:

we have a master POM file, that builds all of our Kura profiles. To build kura containers the following occurs:

1. POM first builds a kura 'base' image, which is used as a resource for other containers. (This basically just compiles kura for the architecture)

https://github.com/eclipse/kura/blob/60fa70ce72434274db9cab391fdd0ec13fb1732b/kura/distrib/pom.xml#L2048C41-L2066

2. We then Take the base image and use it as a resource to build specific images like UBI8 (basically we take the compiled 'binary' from before and install it in a container with an os)

https://github.com/eclipse/kura/blob/60fa70ce72434274db9cab391fdd0ec13fb1732b/kura/distrib/pom.xml#L2102-L2142

3. now you are wondering where the Dockerfile is for these containers. They can be found here:
   Base image: https://github.com/eclipse/kura/tree/develop/kura/distrib/src/main/resources/docker-x86_64-nn
   Ubi-8: https://github.com/eclipse/kura/tree/develop/kura/distrib/src/main/resources/docker-ubi8-x86_64-nn

---

What changes would need to be made

In my opinion, this project is really doable.

1. make a arm32/aarch64 Profile using the respective generic profile. (Basically, duplicate the x86 one, and change x86 to the desired arch)

2. add entry to the pom for the new arch base image**

3)Duplicate the ubi8 and Alpine x86 container profiles, and change them to the desired arch

4. add entry to the pom for these new containers**

**NOTE: our Jenkins pipeline runs on x86, so we must use something like BuildX in docker to cross-compile.

Bonus points: Currently all containers are built with the flag buildAllContainers, it would be nice to keep this flag, and also add buildAllContainers

[akrea]

Thank you for the guidance. I'm currently setting up a Sparkplug 3 testing environment in Node-Red (as I need to educate myself on this too) 🤓. As soon as this is done (by mid September at the latest) I will takle this challenge. May I come back for advice if needed?

[mattdibi]

May I come back for advice if needed?

Yes, of course. Feel free to ping us here in this discussion :)

[akrea]

It'll take a little longer to get going as life threw me some minor curve balls...

[akrea]

In order to evaluate if the image is working, I fired up an existing docker image on a ubuntu server to see how kura is supposed to work and familiarize myself with it.

When I open the documentation I see that there should be a network and a firewall section within the "system"-part. I can imagine that when using docker those two are managed by docker and do not appear (same goes for container orchestration in "service"-part). But then i tried to setup the heater demo. While I was able to install the package successfully (according to logs), the heater does not show up in the Services. Moreover, when I try to install a driver, the Driver Factory --- Select Component Factory --- list is empty. The only warnings I see in the logs are about skins...

On the positive side - I was able to fire up Kapua, connect Kura to the Broker and the connection shows up in Kapua.

Am I missing something or is Kura it supposed to work this way?

[mattdibi]

When I open the documentation I see that there should be a network and a firewall section within the "system"-part. I can imagine that when using docker those two are managed by docker and do not appear (same goes for container orchestration in "service"-part).

That's correct. The dockerized version of Kura doesn't manage the network yet.

But then i tried to setup the heater demo. While I was able to install the package successfully (according to logs), the heater does not show up in the Services

This is not expected. Can you provide a full log? Did you check for additional info in the kura-console.log file under /var/logs?

Moreover, when I try to install a driver, the Driver Factory --- Select Component Factory --- list is empty.

Again. Doesn't sound right. Check again in the logs and the kura-console.log for additional errors.

On the positive side - I was able to fire up Kapua, connect Kura to the Broker and the connection shows up in Kapua.

This is great news!

[GregoryIvo]

Amazing news @akrea! I'm excited to see the PR

[akrea]

Sorry for the wait - was on vacation and needed family time.

AND the time off was good to have a fresh mind:

I did a clean restart of Kura. For the heater I chose the wrong version the first time and didn't notice it and for the driver: i figured that the have to be separately loaded before they appear in the list. Typical case of PEBCAK.

Going forward with some testing.

[akrea]

Sorry it always takes so long to answer. There is just too much going on!

No, changing to QoS 1 did not change the outcome. I can see that the topic tree is created (but that is true for QoS0 too) but no data is fed into it.

In Kapua I did not see any convenient way to get a "snapshot" of the current config. But there is not much my installation. I did docker deploy according to the readme on a vanilla Ubuntu 22.04 Server. The I played around a little, thats when I posted on September, 26th. After that I followed this guide to get the demo working. Actually I followed a youtube video implementing this guide.

If you can point me to the files I can provide you in order to get the info you need - let me know.

Kapua Build is 1.6.9-45cb123fccbf39d8539a01cbad241fd39459051f

[MMaiero]

Thanks.
I have asked you about the qos 1 to try to determine where the issue is.
If you can post the Kura logs, we can see if the message is confirmed. If so, we are sure that the message is delivered and we can look at understanding if there are issues with the Kapua setup.
If not, we will concentrate on the Kura side.

[akrea]

Sure, here you go!

Kura_Logs.zip

[MMaiero]

Ok, so from the logs it seems that the messages are properly sent from Kura and confirmed by Kapua as you can see here:

2023-11-03T18:54:21,419 [DataServiceImpl:Submit] INFO  o.e.k.c.d.t.m.MqttDataTransport - Publishing message on topic: Account123/kura1ID/W1/A1/testasset with QoS: 1
2023-11-03T18:54:21,423 [MQTT Call: kura1ID] INFO  o.e.k.c.d.DataServiceImpl - Confirmed message ID: 255627 to store
2023-11-03T18:54:21,424 [pool-24-thread-1] INFO  o.e.k.e.p.ExamplePublisher - Confirmed message with id: 255627

So, maybe the problem is in the Kapua side.
Can you please post the configuration you have there?
Are you publishing in a root account or in a child account?

[akrea]

As I said

• I just cloned the kapua repo and started the script. I had to change the docker-compse commands to docker compose as I use a newer version of docker. But I did not change anything else in the config. I will galdly post my config but I did not find a way to export configs. Let me know what exactly you need. I did screenshots the about info - if this helps...
• I followed this guide to set up Account123 and User123 (see last screenshot).

[Coduz]

Hi @akrea ,

I'm from the eclipse/kapua project.

May I ask you which version of Kapua are you running?
You can find it in the bottom right corner of the Web UI.

Regards,

Alberto

[akrea]

Hi @Coduz

Thanks for your efforts.

Kapua Build is 1.6.9-45cb123fccbf39d8539a01cbad241fd39459051f

[Coduz]

Do you have any access to logs? Especially the one from the broker and es container?