ados-hal-probe

Probe-first hardware capability detection for Linux single-board computers: CPU, SoC, USB, serial, V4L2 encoders and board profiles, read from the real silicon by the ADOS Drone Agent.

A board description can be wrong, ffmpeg -encoders lists wrapper codecs with no device behind them, and a vendor tool can advertise a feature it cannot deliver. This crate derives capabilities by probing the hardware itself: it reads sysfs and the device tree, issues V4L2 ioctls, or runs a bounded trial initialisation, and records the evidence behind each answer. Use it when software must decide what a board can really do before it relies on it.

use ados_hal_probe::board_sidecar::{detect_tier, load_profiles, match_profile};

// The bundled board profiles parse without any hardware attached.
let profiles = load_profiles();
assert!(!profiles.is_empty());

// Match a device-tree model string to its profile.
let board = match_profile(&profiles, "Raspberry Pi 5 Model B Rev 1.0").unwrap();
assert_eq!(board.soc, "BCM2712");
assert_eq!(board.stem, "rpi5");

// RAM decides the performance tier.
assert_eq!(detect_tier(8192), 4);

Highlights

• Capabilities come from probes, each paired with the evidence that produced it, not from declarations.
• Risky trial initialisations run in their own process group, which is killed as a whole on timeout, so a device stuck in an uninterruptible ioctl cannot hang the caller.
• Destructive probes run only in phases that allow them; read-only probes run in any phase.
• Board profiles are bundled in the crate and parsed at runtime, so detection needs nothing but the binary.

How it works

The result types live in ados_protocol::hwcaps and are re-exported here; this crate owns the I/O.

• probe: read-only probes for CPU core clusters (probe_cores), the SoC compatible string, USB ids, serial ports and the H.264 encoder (probe_h264_encoder).
• runner: runs a trial in a separate process group and sends SIGKILL to the whole group on timeout.
• board_sidecar: the bundled board profiles, profile matching (override, device-tree compatible, model string, /proc/cpuinfo, in that order), RAM tiers and the resulting board fingerprint document.
• camera_probe and sensor_hub: camera and USB sensor hub presence.

Probe phases: stateful probes such as encoder trial initialisation run only when the ProbePhase permits it (Setup or BootPreArm, never Runtime while armed).

// Real probing reads the running host.
let cores = ados_hal_probe::probe_cores();
println!("{cores:?}");

Part of ADOS

Used in production by the ADOS Drone Agent, the onboard software of the ADOS software-defined drone platform. All ADOS crates · Docs · Discord

Other ADOS crates

Platform (versioned with the ADOS Drone Agent)

Standalone

ADOS repositories

License

Licensed under either of Apache License, Version 2.0 or MIT license at your option.

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in this crate by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.