This interaction is done by acquiring data about the environment and, possibly, actuating to achieve the desired objective, with complexity ranging from a simple thermostat to a very complex industrial process control (e.g. chemical plant). In more practical terms, the main CPU interacts directly with those sensors and actuators and the OS (Linux in our case) provides an abstract view in the form of device drivers.
Even though the container runtime allows direct access to device drivers, containers running on Kubernetes in the cloud are not expected to do so since hardware independence is a very useful characteristic to enhance mobility.
Kubernetes primarily manages CPU, memory, storage, and network, while leaving other resources unmanaged.
In IoT environments, applications can have direct access to sensors and actuators, either directly by interfacing with a device driver on the kernel (e.g. digital I/O pins, temperature sensors, analog inputs, microphones, audio output, video cameras) or indirectly through hardware interfaces (like serial ports, I2C, SPI, bluetooth, LoRa, USB and others).
Controlled access to these devices is essential to enable a container-based IoT solution. Smarter-device-manager allows containers to have direct access to host devices in a secure way.
The smarter-device-manager starts by reading a YAML configuration file. This configuration file describes, using regular expressions, the files that identify each device that is to be exported and how many access can be done simultaneously. For example, the configuration below finds every V4L device (cameras, video tuners, etc...) available on the host node (/dev/video0, /dev/video1, etc), and adds them as resources (smarter-devices/video0, smarter-devices/video1, etc) that allow up to 10 simulatenous accesses (up to 10 containers can request access to those devices simultaneously).
The default config file provided will enable most of the devices available on a Raspberry Pi (vers 1-4) or equivalent boards. I2C, SPI, video devices, sound and others would be enabled. The config file can be replaced using a configmap to enable or disable access to different devices, like accelerators, GPUs, etc.
MemoryPressure False Thu, 16 Jan 2020 08:20:06 -0600 Mon, 02 Dec 2019 09:22:56 -0600 KubeletHasSufficientMemory kubelet has sufficient memory available
DiskPressure False Thu, 16 Jan 2020 08:20:06 -0600 Wed, 04 Dec 2019 09:47:08 -0600 KubeletHasNoDiskPressure kubelet has no disk pressure
PIDPressure False Thu, 16 Jan 2020 08:20:06 -0600 Mon, 02 Dec 2019 09:22:56 -0600 KubeletHasSufficientPID kubelet has sufficient PID available
Ready True Thu, 16 Jan 2020 08:20:06 -0600 Mon, 16 Dec 2019 14:58:05 -0600 KubeletReady kubelet is posting ready status. AppArmor enabled
Addresses:
InternalIP: XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
Hostname: pike5
Capacity:
cpu: 4
ephemeral-storage: 14999512Ki
memory: 873348Ki
pods: 110
smarter-devices/gpiochip0: 10
smarter-devices/gpiochip1: 10
smarter-devices/gpiochip2: 10
smarter-devices/gpiomem: 10
smarter-devices/i2c-1: 10
smarter-devices/snd: 10
smarter-devices/vchiq: 10
smarter-devices/vcs: 0
smarter-devices/vcsm: 10
smarter-devices/vcsm-cma: 0
smarter-devices/video10: 0
smarter-devices/video11: 0
smarter-devices/video12: 0
smarter-devices/video4: 10
Allocatable:
cpu: 4
ephemeral-storage: 13823550237
memory: 770948Ki
pods: 110
smarter-devices/gpiochip0: 10
smarter-devices/gpiochip1: 10
smarter-devices/gpiochip2: 10
smarter-devices/gpiomem: 10
smarter-devices/i2c-1: 10
smarter-devices/snd: 10
smarter-devices/vchiq: 10
smarter-devices/vcs: 0
smarter-devices/vcsm: 10
smarter-devices/vcsm-cma: 0
smarter-devices/video10: 0
smarter-devices/video11: 0
smarter-devices/video12: 0
smarter-devices/video4: 10
System Info:
Machine ID: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
System UUID: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Boot ID: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Kernel Version: 5.3.0-1014-raspi2
OS Image: Ubuntu 19.10
Operating System: linux
Architecture: arm
Container Runtime Version: docker://19.3.2
Kubelet Version: v1.13.5
Kube-Proxy Version: v1.13.5
Non-terminated Pods: (5 in total)
Namespace Name CPU Requests CPU Limits Memory Requests Memory Limits AGE
The smarter-device-manager is a container that, when deployed, reads the /dev directory and, based on the provided configuration file located at "/root/config/conf.yaml", identifies which devices it can export. The container then uses the Kubernetes kubelet device plugin interface to inform the kubelet that those devices are available. Kubelet will use the plugin interface to ask the smarter-device-manager how to enable access to each device when a pod requests access to that device. Smarter-device-manager uses the "--device" option of the OCI to add that device to the container /dev directory and adds that device to the device cgroup so the container.
A few examples of yaml files are provided that enable the smarter-device-manager to be deployed in a node. The file smarter-device-management-pod-<>.yaml deploys a single pod on a node; this setup is useful for testing. The file smarter-device-manager-<>.yaml provides a deamonSet configuration that enables pods to be deployed in any node that contains the "smarter-device-manager=enabled" label. The following command inserts the daemonSet in Kubernetes. k3s and k8s put the unix sockets for the device plugin in different directories on the node so the \*-k8s.yaml files should be used on Kubernetes and the \*-k3s.yaml should be used on k3s.
