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About Intel® Edge Controls for Industrial¶

Intel® Edge Controls for Industrial (Intel® ECI or ECI) is about solving industrial challenges easier. This fundamental goal guides ECI and is the philosophy behind behind every ECI component, tutorial, and so on. The ECI team constantly engages with industrial customers to learn about their challenges and work together to solve them. Here are some learnings and different ways in which ECI can help:

Simplicity
Solutions need to be simple to follow and use. ECI provides simplicity through familiar package management (Deb packages) and comprehensive documentation.
Support
In the industrial space, the expectation is that the customers would be able to use the solutions for over a decade. The solutions that work today should also work after a decade. ECI provides support through periodic package updates while ensuring continued compatibility with Intel® processors and products.
Determinism (Real-time)
Industrial applications often have complex real-time requirements. Data must be processed and decisions made within a finite time interval. ECI enables determinism through real-time Linux* kernels (PREEMPT_RT and Xenomai), verified configurations, and tools to help leverage Intel silicon features such as Cache Allocation Technology (CAT) and Time Sensitive Networking (TSN).
Consolidation
Industrial use cases often employ Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC), and a common trend is converting these hardware-bound PLCs to software PLCs. It is possible to deploy multiple software PLCs and operating systems onto a single compute system to reduce cost by leveraging virtualization. ECI provides consolidation through real-time hypervisors and templates for microservices.
Familiar Tools
ECI builds upon many standard industrial tools, such as commercial software PLCs, Robotic Operating Systems (ROS), PLCopen, CANopen, and so on. By reusing the tools the customers are familiar with, ECI enables immediate access to optimizations and enhancements without needing to redesign or learn new tools.

ECI Support¶

Intel® is constantly working towards improving ECI, by providing:

Updates to Linux kernels, including PREEMPT_RT and Xenomai variants
Support for upcoming Intel processors and other products
Fixes for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs)
Validation on previous generation processors to ensure continued compatibility
New features and enhancements

To learn more about the upcoming features of ECI, refer to the ECI feature roadmap.

ECI License¶

Usage of Intel® Edge Controls for Industrial is permitted under the terms of the Intel® Edge Controls for Industrial Software License Agreement.

ECI Features¶

The following are the key features of ECI. Click each feature to learn about the related components:

Time Deterministic Compute Keeps industrial processes working predictably with deterministic compute	Workload Convergence Uses virtualization and containerization configurations to consolidate mixed-criticality workloads	Application and Platform Management Enables zero-downtime updates and enhanced maintainability, with increased flexibility due to real-time workload orchestration	Infrastructure Management Scales control node clusters with software-defined infrastructure, including network, storage, and CPU
Industrial Connectivity Bridges brownfield and greenfield communication technologies to achieve a complete edge-to-cloud solution	Controls Application Offers production-verified and standards-compliant controls samples to simplify production and deployment	More Security Provides authentication and confidentiality capabilities that cover the entire computing environment, from chip to cloud	Functional Safety Provides safety using capable tool chain and software, and built-in fault-tolerance mechanisms

ECI Industrial Applications¶

ECI is very flexible and can be applied to a wide range of applications and end equipment:

Process automation (such as oil and gas industry): ECI allows control execution to be managed as containerized microservices. Using advanced orchestration techniques, the platform also improves redundancy with increased workload availability and portability.

Equipment manufacturers: ECI makes it possible to consolidate motion and logic control and provides a local user interface to monitor processes and enable supervisory controls. A platform management agent simplifies software updates and application provisioning.

Discrete automation (such as automotive manufacturing): ECI enables low-latency motion control and puts safety first. Using a fully managed infrastructure, the platform can securely onboard new nodes and update software.

Robotics Control: ECI adds Robot Operating System (ROS2) software to Discrete automation for easy integration with existing robotic applications.

How ECI Achieves Determinism¶

Determinism is defined as the ability to operate with a predictable outcome. In the context of the Linux kernel, this means that applications can run without experiencing spurious interrupts, which enables them to achieve consistent real-time performance.

At its core, ECI is an optimized Linux kernel with specific configurations to enable real-time workloads to operate deterministically. This is accomplished by the following:

Specification	Description
Optimized Linux kernel	ECI provides an optimized Linux Intel LTS PREEMPT_RT kernel for real-time workloads. For a list of kernel configurations and boot parameters used to optimize the Linux kernel, refer to ECI Kernel Configuration Optimizations and ECI Kernel Boot Optimizations.
Cache Allocation Technology	ECI leverages an Intel silicon feature called Cache Allocation Technology which helps address shared resource concerns by providing software control of where data is allocated into the last-level cache (LLC), enabling isolation and prioritization of key applications.
CPU Isolation	By default, all Linux kernel processes are scheduled to run on CPU 0 and CPUs 1 and 3 are configured to be isolated for real-time usage.
Network interrupt affinity to CPU	ECI Network Interrupts Affinity to CPU recommends to selectively move critical Ethernet device interrupts. for prioritized traffic-class onto a CPU other than CPU 0.
Tickless kernel	ECI builds the Linux kernel to be tickless. With a tickless kernel, timer interrupts do not occur at regular intervals, but are only delivered as required. This minimizes the number of kernel interrupts to the minimum required.
Persistent C-States and CPU frequency	ECI builds the Linux kernel to maintain persistent CPU power/frequency state. With this configuration, the CPU never reduces clock speed, remaining at a single frequency to consistently process real-time workloads.

ECI Technology Domains¶

ECI comprises Deb packages for Debian* 11 (Bullseye) and Ubuntu* 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). By installing ECI Deb packages into an existing environment, you can quickly bring solutions to a multitude of technology domains. The following table lists the components grouped based on the technology domain they pertain to.

Click each link to learn more.

Domain	ECI Components and Features
Hypervisor Domain	GNU/Linux KVM Hypervisor and Upstream Virtualization Tools
	Real-Time Systems Hypervisor (RTH) and Tools
	Project ACRN Hypervisor, Device Model, APIs, and Tools
Kernel Domain	Linux Intel LTS kernel
	Linux Intel LTS PREEMPT_RT kernel
	XENOMAI Dovetail Co-kernel
Connectivity Domain	Intel® Edge Control Protocol Bridge and Plugins
	IEC-62541 OPC-UA Framework and DX Resources
	IEC-60802 TSN Endstation Profiles and DX Resources
	FM350-GL Linux driver and 5G DX Resources
	AX210 Linux driver & WiFi 6E DX Resources
SoftPLC Domain	CODESYS® IEC61131-3 Control and DX Resources
	IEC-61158 EtherCAT Master and DX Resources
	IEC-61131-3 (part 1 and 2) Motion Control DX Resources
	IEC-50325-4 CANopen for Automation (CiA301)
Realtime Optimization Domain	Benchmarking & Performance Characterization Real-time Suite and Timeview-UI
	Intel® TCC Tools and DX Resources
	Linux XDP/eBPF and DX Resources
	Real-time Data Agent/Broker DX Resources
Application Domain	Container Runtime and ECI Configs (dockerd)
	Intel® Edge Insights for Industrial (Intel® EII)
	Robot Operating System (ROS2)
	Intel® Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0
	Intel® Slimboot OS Loader SBL ◆
	Intel® Functional Safety (Zephyr EHL FuSa SW) ◆
	Intel® oneAPI APT Repo Source (apt.repos.intel.com)
Infrastructure Domain	Intel® In-Band Manageability .
Security Domain	Intel® Trusted Edge Platform (TEP) ◆

◆ - These are available only on legacy Yocto build.

ECI Deb Packages and Installation Images¶

ECI is available to you via Deb packages and installation images. Click each tab to learn more.

ECI focuses on four industrial applications, and includes the following use cases:

eci-process-automation
eci-manufacturing-equipment
eci-discrete-manufacturing
eci-robotics-control

To instantiate these use cases quickly, ECI provides Deb packages for Debian and Ubuntu. For a complete list of ECI Deb packages, refer to ECI Packages Lists. The high-level Deb packages, also referred to as meta-packages, do not contain any distributable assets, but have install-time dependencies on other packages.

The following figure illustrates the dependencies of ECI meta-packages (high-level Deb packages) on various domains:

Attention

The Use Case and Domain-specific meta-packages install a collection of Deb packages. They do not configure the system, instantiate any applications, or turn the system into a ready-to-use solution. Do not install these meta-packages with the expectation that the system will be completely ready for deployment.