Interview: SystemReady boost for IoT supply chains
The Covid pandemic highlighted the importance of the semiconductor supply chain and the need for a flexible software ecosystem.
John Thompson, senior director of Software and Ecosystems, IoT Line of Business at ARM talks to Nick Flaherty about a project with Schneider Electric to mitigate the challenges of porting applications from one processor to another across the Internet of Things (IoT) and industrial automation.
ARM worked with French IoT system developer Schneider Electric to port applications using the ARM SystemReady specification in just a few days, Previously it had taken Schneider two to three years to develop new platforms from a central team.
“This concept with Schneider is one of the first end to end demonstrations of real world deployment and scale,” said Thompson. “The background to this piece of work is supply chain security and flexibility of sourcing. They approached us to port their industrial workloads to the ARM architecture and be capable of running on a wide range of boards.”
The development focussed on two workloads for real time industrial machines based around a machine vision AI workload.
Schneider Electric’s existing software architecture was not very portable. Much of the software was designed with the underlying hardware for maximum performance. This optimization decreased flexibility in that any alteration of hardware components forced an arduous and costly overhaul of software. Developing an entirely new product design could take two to three years, which was far too long given the supply instability Schneider Electric faced.
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Schneider determined that many of its completed industrial IoT solutions for different use cases and markets performed similar functions but ran on different hardware platforms. This forced development teams to repurpose code from one platform to another, which was inefficient and time-consuming.
But Schneider has a central platform team, tasked with exploring ways the company’s engineering and software development teams can become more efficient and develop products more efficiently and quickly. They were looking for ways to improve design agility and ability to port software between different hardware platforms, according to Julien Duquesnay, Senior Principal System Engineer Architect on the team.
The platform team was talking with ARM on software-defined projects, as part of the company’s push toward what it calls the software-defined industrial system (SDIS). They agreed on a proof-of-concept project – involving Schneider Electric, ARM, and system integrator Witekio, to explore whether ARM SystemReady was a suitable platform for their needs.
SystemReady provides an OS interoperability framework to ensure standard firmware interfaces can be deployed and maintained on ARM-based systems. This defines minimum requirements ensure that ARM-based platforms have operating system and boot interoperability. “Everything that can accelerate our design cycles is good,” Duquesnay said. “Reducing time to market, regardless of the environment, that’s a good thing.”
As a first step in creating the test case, Schneider Electric established a collaborative partnership. The team included ARM, for guidance and expertise on development within the ARM ecosystem and Linux, and Witekio, for their knowledge of embedded software services and IoT operations.
The porting of Schneider Linux to the first ARM-based board took several weeks, and, once this was complete, the team was able to complete the port to the second board, following the SystemReady requirements, in less than a working day. Integration typically takes much longer.
“They came to us with two preferred platforms based on an AMD/Xilinx ZCU102 FPGA and an NXP Layerscale processor. These were already compliant with the firmware standards and made some key contributions to the stack for the requirements from Schneider,” said Thompson.
The project included patches for pre-empt real time operation (RT) on top of the Xen hypervisor and a combination of the Schneider in house Linux and real time software.
“Can it run, yes. Can it run all the characteristics? There is always more work to be done especially in industrial with hard real time, and they all need to pass safety cases and provide given latencies and determinism,” said Thompson.
“We got the boards up and running in two or three days and then optimised, that’s a really significant improvement as that’s not where Schneider adds value.”
“It’s making sure the firmware shipped by silicon and board vendors is in line with the SystemReady [specification], and it was really useful to go through this process as we got data back. Its very easy to create standards in isolation, and we have working groups and bring all the partners together, but it’s really important that the real world deployments show the value.”
“The workloads were soft real time with a set level of determinism for the factory floor,” said Thompson. “The virtualisation was mainly done in software with the hypervisor providing the determinism. That shift in workloads supports manufacturers who want to run [processing] at the edge, for example one core for real time and three others for heavy Linux operations. We are seeing that more for A-class ARM cores now.”
“There were also other configurations with different cache sizes to find what worked the best,” said Thompson. “The scope of SystemReady is to enable the hypervisor and is to be deployed across platforms,. It is not doing the workload orchestration.”
The question of whether CPUs or custom hardware accelerators is workload dependent, says Thompson. “On a mobile CPU it’s a viable approach. In industrial with power requirements, you have to be more careful on how to optimise the workloads.”
“First and foremost for SystemReady we make sure the firmware is consistent with the standards and has system characteristics that need to be met, it needs to boot, to be interrogated over USB or UART, output to a display to test the capabilities, so you need a level of system capability available”
The porting can take soe time, depending on the state of the software and the dependencies.
“The time it takes depends on the state of the firmware, with some back and forth, if the firmware is ready the turnaround is around a month. There are other things we are looking at,” said Thompson.
There also needs to be certification for SystemReady boards. “We have third party labs for certification as we don’t want to be the bottleneck and we have the independence.”
“We have developed compliance suites internally and we are making those more automated so the partners can run these themselves and build those into the build pipelines. One thing I would like to see over the next 12 months is more continual compliance, as new builds continue to be complaint, especially in the IoT where devices are in the field for many years its really important that the systems are kept up to date and secure.
“There’s definitely a difference between standards to easy deployment but also providing enough room for how the workloads are deployed and orchestrated, so there is a constant challenge in not creating barriers to deployment.”
For the project, embracing SystemReady compatibility would mean that when supply chain issues force Schneider Electric to switch hardware mid-way through development, only minor changes would be needed to port the software stack.
“When we are thinking of a new platform, and we want to test and compare different SoCs, knowing that we can take a SystemReady-certified board with the SoC we’re looking at and quickly run our software on it so we can start to run tests and see how it behaves for us is key,” said Duquesnay at Schneider.
“If an SoC can be part of a SystemReady-certified system, we think that it will remove a lot of risk.”
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