Dmabuf Transport

dmabuf_transport is a package for zero-copy transport of ROS messages using Linux dma-buf file descriptors.

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👋 Overview

Dmabuf Transport provides a way to share data between different hardware accelerators and different ROS nodes with zero-copy.

When ROS nodes send data with supported types, they send dma-buf descriptors (fd) instead of the data itself.

It is built on ROS 2 Type Adaption, which allows us to define methods for serializing directly to the user-requested type and/or using that type in intra-process communication.

Dmabuf descriptors can be transported between multiple ROS nodes and are zero-copy accessible by multiple hardware accelerators, such as GPUs and DSPs.

Note

This package need Linux kernel 5.12+ and ROS Humble later version.

🔎 Table of contents

• Supported types
• Supported targets
• Installation
• Usage
• Build from source
• Contributing
• Contributors
• License

⚓ Supported types

QRB ROS Transport Type	ROS Interfaces
dmabuf_transport::type::Image	sensor_msgs::msg::Image
dmabuf_transport::type::PointCloud2	sensor_msgs::msg::PointCloud2

🎯 Supported targets

Development Hardware	Qualcomm Dragonwing™ RB3 Gen2	Qualcomm Dragonwing™ IQ-9075 EVK
Hardware Overview

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✨ Installation

Important

PREREQUISITES: The following steps need to be run on Qualcomm Ubuntu and ROS Jazzy.
Refer to Install Ubuntu on Qualcomm IoT Platforms and Install ROS Jazzy to set up your environment.
For Qualcomm Linux, please check out the Qualcomm Intelligent Robotics Product SDK documents.

Add Qualcomm IOT PPA for Ubuntu:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-qcom-iot/qirp
sudo apt update

Install Debian package:

sudo apt install ros-jazzy-dmabuf-transport

🚀 Usage

This section shows how to use dmabuf_transport in your projects, Here, we use dmabuf_transport::type::Image as an example.

Add the dependencies in your package.xml:

<depend>dmabuf_transport</depend>

Use ament_cmake_auto to find dependencies in your CMakeLists.txt:

find_package(ament_cmake_auto REQUIRED)
ament_auto_find_build_dependencies()

Using adapted types in your ROS node

#include "dmabuf_transport/type/image.hpp"

// Create message
auto msg = std::make_unique<dmabuf_transport::type::Image>();
msg->header = std_msgs::msg::Header();
msg->width = width;
msg->height = height;
msg->encoding = "rgb8";

// Allocate dmabuf for message
auto dmabuf = lib_mem_dmabuf::DmaBuffer::alloc(size, "/dev/dma_heap/system");
// ... set data to dmabuf
msg->dmabuf = dmabuf;

// Publish message
pub->publish(std::move(msg));

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👨‍💻 Build from source

Dependencies

Install dependencies:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-qcom-iot/qirp
sudo apt update

sudo apt install \
  ros-jazzy-ros-core \
  ros-dev-tools \
  ros-jazzy-sensor-msgs \
  ros-jazzy-lib-mem-dmabuf \

Build

Download the source code and build it with colcon

source /opt/ros/jazzy/setup.bash
git clone https://github.com/qualcomm-qrb-ros/dmabuf_transport.git
colcon build

🤝 Contributing

We love community contributions! Get started by reading our CONTRIBUTING.md.
Feel free to create an issue for bug report, feature requests or any discussion💡.

❤️ Contributors

Thanks to all our contributors who have helped make this project better!

penww

jiaxshi

quic-zhaoyuan

📜 License

Project is licensed under the BSD-3-Clause License. See LICENSE for the full license text.