Emulation / VirtualMachine of IOT2040

Hi all,

in a few days I will make my second workshop for our customer/colleagues about IOT2040, and I would let all the attendees work on IOT, Node RED and all the other tools that we are using.

For the first workshop  every attendee had an IOT and was easy to play, but because for the next Workshop there will be about 30 attendee, I would to create some kind of Virtual Machine or a Emulated IOT in order to work with that for who doesn't have it.

Do you know if it possibile to make a VM based on IOT2040 Siemens Image?

There are software that can emulate HW of IOT?

Any other cool ideas for a VIRTUAL IOT2040?

Thank you.

Davide

A common way to emulate boards these days is via QEMU, like the Android SDK is doing it as well (though not exactly like: they created an unmaintainable fork of QEMU). But so far, there is no support for the Galileo board or our IOT2000 hardware in QEMU.

Done that before, e.g. in a minimal form for testing firmware images of a Siemens device, more sophisticated for fun in order to emulate a complete web radio (http://www.elinux.org/Freecom_MusicPal, unfortunately many links are dead by now).

While it is technically doable, efforts depend on the degree of emulation you want to achieve. Specifically, I/O interfaces need to be there, and you need some user interfaces for them (virtual LEDs, virtual buttons etc.).

Moreover, the current example image does not even boot in QEMU or other hypervisors because it expects an SD-card interface, compatible with the Quark SoC. That can be addressed by a custom image, though.

 Thank you jan-k for your prompt reply.

So if I understand well, there is no possibility now to emulate IOT2040 with the standard image.

I will try QEMU maybe with a custom image.

What about Docker? I've seen it on the first version of IOT2040 Image, for Eclipse Development package.

Many thanks

Davide

jan-k

A common way to emulate boards these days is via QEMU, like the Android SDK is doing it as well (though not exactly like: they created an unmaintainable fork of QEMU). But so far, there is no support for the Galileo board or our IOT2000 hardware in QEMU.

Done that before, e.g. in a minimal form for testing firmware images of a Siemens device, more sophisticated for fun in order to emulate a complete web radio (http://www.elinux.org/Freecom_MusicPal, unfortunately many links are dead by now).

While it is technically doable, efforts depend on the degree of emulation you want to achieve. Specifically, I/O interfaces need to be there, and you need some user interfaces for them (virtual LEDs, virtual buttons etc.).

Moreover, the current example image does not even boot in QEMU or other hypervisors because it expects an SD-card interface, compatible with the Quark SoC. That can be addressed by a custom image, though.

Docker - that is an interesting idea... let's try:

kpartx -a /path/to/iot2000-example-image
mount /dev/mapper/loop0p2 /mnt
tar -C /mnt/ -c . | docker import - iot2000

Now I just blindly ran:

docker run --rm -i -t iot2000 bash

and started node-red inside the container. It didn't fully boot most of the time, sometimes hung, sometimes even crashed loudly. After wondering for a while why my shiny Core i7 couldn't run code that was compiled for a Pentium process, it suddenly made click: too many cores!

This does the trick:

docker run --rm --cpuset-cpus=0 -i -t iot2000 \
    node /usr/lib/node_modules/node-red/red

Of course, mraa complains about unknown platform, and there is no I/O, but maybe you can do other interesting things with it. Let us know!

 Many thanks jan-k!

I will try in the next days, and I keep you updated!

jan-k

Docker - that is an interesting idea... let's try:

kpartx -a /path/to/iot2000-example-image
mount /dev/mapper/loop0p2 /mnt
tar -C /mnt/ -c . | docker import - iot2000

Now I just blindly ran:

docker run --rm -i -t iot2000 bash

and started node-red inside the container. It didn't fully boot most of the time, sometimes hung, sometimes even crashed loudly. After wondering for a while why my shiny Core i7 couldn't run code that was compiled for a Pentium process, it suddenly made click: too many cores!

This does the trick:

docker run --rm --cpuset-cpus=0 -i -t iot2000 \
    node /usr/lib/node_modules/node-red/red

Of course, mraa complains about unknown platform, and there is no I/O, but maybe you can do other interesting things with it. Let us know!