Using USB Devices with Roving Edge Ultra Nodes

Use USB devices with Roving Edge Ultra devices.

The Roving Edge Ultra node now appears in the nodes list within the compartment where you moved it.

You can connect a USB device with your Roving Edge Ultra device and make it available to a virtual machine (VM) compute instance. For example, you can attach a camera to the OpenCV analytics workload, or attach a Mobius VPU to an inferencing workload.

Using a USB device with your Ultra device requires you create your VM compute instance using the Specialty shape type. The USB devices that you plug into the Ultra device become available to the VM instance using the PCI passthrough. See Creating an Instance for a Roving Edge Infrastructure Device for more information.

Installing the Driver

Ensure that the image that you use to create the USB-shape VM has the driver needed to run the USB device. Unplug and then plug in the USB device to verify that the VM reports new network interfaces after plugging in the device. In Linux, the command to list the set of network interfaces is usually ifconfig.

If the VM cannot recognize the USB device, install the necessary driver. Consult with the device manufacturers for the drivers and installation instructions. You might need to enable some services and reboot the VM for the installed driver to run.

Tip

After you confirm that the VM recognizes the USB device, Oracle recommends you create a machine image out from the VM for future use.

IP and Route Setup

For Wi-Fi dongles, refer to its documentation on how to connect to wireless networks.

For USB Ethernet adaptors, you might want to set up the respective network interfaces. Here are some Linux commands to help you set up the interfaces.

• Confirm the name of the USB Ethernet network interface: ip addr sh | grep "inet"

• Add an IP on the network interface: sudo ip addr add IP/subnet_mask dev interface_name

• Show all routes: ip route sh

• Show the route to a specific destination: ip route get destination_IP/FQDN

• Add a route: sudo ip route add destination_IP/subnet_mask via gateway_IP dev interface_name

You can adjust the iptables rules on the VM as well.

To check whether traffic goes through and arrives at specific destinations using the specific interface (and IP) as wanted, use the ping and tcpdump commands. For example:

• Ping a specific destination: ping destination

• Check if ping packets arrive at an interface: sudo tcpdump -i interface_name icmp -n

Alternatively, you can set up a DHCP server in the network to which the USB device is going to connect, so the VM with the USB-compatible shape has the network of the USB device set up automatically.