Vector SIL Kit Adapter for virtual CAN (Linux only)

This collection of software is provided to illustrate how the Vector SIL Kit can be attached to a virtual CAN (Controller Area Network) interface SocketCAN running in Linux kernel.

This repository contains instructions to build the adapter and set up a minimal working development environment.

The main contents are working examples of necessary software to connect the running system to a SIL Kit environment, as well as complimentary demo applications for some communication to happen.

Those instructions assume you use a Linux OS (or a virtual machine running a Linux image) for building and running the adapter and use bash as your interactive shell.

Note: WSL/WSL2 are excluded from this context as their standard kernels don't support SocketCAN.

a) Getting Started with self-built Adapter and Demos

This section specifies steps you should do if you have just cloned the repository.

First, change your current directory to the top-level in the sil-kit-adapters-vcan repository:

cd /path/to/sil-kit-adapters-vcan

Fetch Third Party Software

The first thing that you should do is initializing the submodules to fetch the required third party software:

git submodule update --init --recursive

Otherwise clone the standalone version of asio manually:

git clone --branch asio-1-24-0 https://github.com/chriskohlhoff/asio.git third_party/asio

Build the Adapter

To build the adapter, you'll need an ubuntu SIL Kit package SilKit-x.y.z-$ubuntu. You can download it directly from Vector SIL Kit Releases. The easiest way would be to download it with your web browser, unzip it and place it on your file system, where it also can be accessed by bash.

The adapter and demos are built using cmake:

mkdir build
cmake -S. -Bbuild -DSILKIT_PACKAGE_DIR=/path/to/SilKit-x.y.z-$ubuntu/ -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build --parallel

Note 1: If you have a self-built or pre-built version of SIL Kit, you can build the adapter against it by setting SILKIT_PACKAGE_DIR to the path, where the bin, include and lib directories are.

Note 2: If you have SIL Kit installed on your system, you can build the adapter against it, even by not providing SILKIT_PACKAGE_DIR to the installation path at all.

Note 3: If you don't provide a specific path for SILKIT_PACKAGE_DIR and there is no SIL Kit installation on your system, a SIL Kit release package (the default version listed in CMakeLists.txt) will be fetched from github.com and the adapter will be built against it.

The adapter and demo executables will be available in the bin directory. Additionally the SilKit shared library is copied to the lib directory next to it automatically.

b) Getting Started with pre-built Adapter and Demos

Download a preview or a release of the adapter directly from Vector SIL Kit Adapter for virtual CAN Releases.

You should also download a SIL Kit Release directly from Vector SIL Kit Releases. You will need this for being able to start a sil-kit-registry.

Install the sil-kit-adapter-vcan (optional)

If you call the following command (can be done for self-built and pre-built package after cmake configure) sil-kit-adapter-vcan can be called from everywhere without defining a path:

sudo cmake --build build --target install

The default installation path will be /usr/local/bin. Be aware that SIL Kit itself also needs to be installed to make this work.

Run the sil-kit-adapter-vcan

This application allows the user to attach virtual CAN interfaces (SocketCAN) running in Linux environment to the SIL Kit.

Before you start the adapter there always needs to be a sil-kit-registry running already. Start it e.g. like this:

./path/to/SilKit-x.y.z-$ubuntu/SilKit/bin/sil-kit-registry --listen-uri 'silkit://0.0.0.0:8501'

It is also necessary that a virtual CAN interface is already opened and running in Linux kernel before you run the adapter. This can be done using the following terminal commands:

sudo modprobe vcan
ip link add dev can0 type vcan
ip link set up can0

Note: These commands will open a virtual CAN interface with the name can0.

Now you can run the adapter from terminal.

The application optionally takes the following command line arguments:

sil-kit-adapter-vcan [--name <participant name{SilKitAdapterVcan}>]
    [--configuration <path to .silkit.yaml or .json configuration file>]
    [--registry-uri silkit://<host{localhost}>:<port{8501}>]
    [--log <Trace|Debug|Warn|{Info}|Error|Critical|Off>]
    [--can-name <vcan device name{can0}>]
    [--network <SIL Kit CAN network{CAN1}>]
    [--help]

Note: SIL Kit-specific CLI arguments will be overwritten by the config file specified by --configuration.

SocketCAN Demo

The aim of this demo is to showcase a simple adapter that forwards CAN traffic from Linux terminal running a virtual CAN interface through to Vector SIL Kit.

This demo is further explained in SocketCAN/README.md.

QEMU Demo

This demo is a step-by-step guide on how to use the adapter to link a QEMU image with an exposed SocketCAN interface to a SIL Kit CAN network, as well as some instructions to setup the QEMU image with an exposed SocketCAN interface.

This demo is further explained in QEMU/README.md.