Integrating Arm Virtual Hardware with the TensorFlow Lite Micro Continuous Integration Infrastructure

- name: Fetch results from Arm Virtual Hardware     run: |       cat ./tensorflow/lite/micro/tools/github/arm_virtual_hardware/cortex_m_generic.log

You can find a detailed explanation of avhclient and its usage on the .

Expanding the toolbox by adding more hardware targets

Using AVH it is easy to extend tests to all available Arm platforms. You can also avoid a negative impact on the overall CI workflow execution time by hosting through cloud services like AWS and spawning an arbitrary number of AVH instances in parallel.

Virtual Hardware targets like the Corstone-310 demonstrate how software validation is feasible even before silicon is available. This will make well-tested software stacks available for new Cortex-M devices from day one and we plan to expand the support. The introduction of Corstone-1000 will extend the range of tested architectures into the world of Cortex-A application processors, including , Cortex-A53.

Wrapping up

To summarize: by providing a workflow file, a use-case file, and a workload (in our case, a test script), we have enabled running all the TFLM unit tests on the Corstone-300 and will work to extend it to all AVH targets available.

Thanks to the AVH integration, CI flows with virtual hardware targets open up new possibilities. Choosing the right architecture, integrating, and verifying has never been easier. We believe it is an important step in making embedded ML more accessible and that it will pave the way for future applications.

Thank you for reading!

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge a number of our colleagues at Arm who have contributed to this project, including Samuel Peligrinello Caipers, Fredrik Knutsson, and Måns Nilsson.

We would also like to thank Advait Jain from Google and John Withers of Berkeley Design Technology, Inc. for architecting a continuous integration system using GitHub Actions that has enabled the Arm Virtual Hardware integration described in this article.