Timeline for ROS Humble Transition

[mitsudome-r]

in the last week's Autonomy Software Working Group, I have proposed transitioning to ROS2 Humble from Galactic, but I thought it would be worth posting it as a separate discussion to have wider attention.

Here's the timeline of the current transition plan.

As shown in the diagram, we plan to have Humble as the main development platform from September. The date is tentative, however, and we can still delay the switch to Humble if anyone has a reason to do so. Please let us know by a comment on this discussion thread if you have any requests to change the date of transition. There is no strict deadline for the proposal, but it would be nice if you can could make it by the end of June.

For the details about the transition plan (reasons for transition, action items, etc.), please refer to Transition.strategy.to.ROS.2.Humble.pdf.

[kenji-miyake]

You can try Humble with this PR: autowarefoundation/autoware_core_universe_prototype#330 -> #2692
Or you can use Docker images here: https://github.com/autowarefoundation/autoware/pkgs/container/autoware-universe

[mitsudome-r]

As we have entered the evaluation phase for Humble release, current code is able to build in Humble environment, and some of engineers have started to do evaluation of some of the features.

In order to have evaluation process done smoothly, the new CI has been added to check the building in Humble: autowarefoundation/autoware.universe#967.
We currently expect all new PRs to pass the CI so that we can use the newest code for evaluating Humble, but if we find out that this becomes a burden to many developers, we will create a separate branch for further Humble testing and merge with main branch afterwords. Please let us know in this thread if you feel uncomfortable with the current CI settings.

[hueirutseng]

Hi, this is ITRI Autonomous bus team. From our point of view, it would be prefer to slightly postpone the switch to Humble. The reason is because our autonomous system is also under transition from ROS 1 to ROS 2 galactic / Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04. After the upgrade is done, we will evaluate the further upgrade plan (to Humble). Thanks.

[kenji-miyake]

@hueirutseng Sure, I think the request can be accepted. Would it be possible for you to share the rough timeline of your transition/evaluation plan?

[kenji-miyake]

@hueirutseng By the way, is it impossible to use the fixed version for your system?
I mean, Autoware creates a tag that supports both Galactic and Humble right before we drop Galactic support. In that case, I guess there is no need to delay the schedule.

Regarding the Humble evaluation, TIER IV has already finished basic checks and there was no big problem.

[kenji-miyake]

@hueirutseng Friendly ping. If you can't provide enough information, it might be difficult to meet your requests.

[hueirutseng]

@kenji-miyake Sorry for the late reply. It is roughly estimated that the transition phase (from ROS 1 to ROS 2 Galactic) could be done by July. After that, we will start the on-vehicle testing at ITRI campus. At that time, we might start to evaluate another transition phase from Galacic to Humble. However, if TIER IV has already finished the checks, we believe it would be fine to keep your original time line for the transition. Thanks.

[mitsudome-r]

I had a chance to talk this with some Autoware developers, but I believe many users are still using Galactic, and I would like to propose to extend the support of Galactic branch until November. The maintenance cost of two branches seems to be lower than expected, and I think it is manageable until November.

Any comments?

[kenji-miyake]

Seeing NVIDIA libraries (cuDNN/TensorRT) for Ubuntu 22.04 aren't released yet, it's a good idea to extend the Galactic support for a while.
https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu2204/x86_64/

[kenji-miyake]

TensorRT for CUDA 11.8 was released. But for now, it's only for amd64, not for arm64 yet.

[kenji-miyake]

@xmfcx @mitsudome-r Considering Galactic support ends this month, let's discuss the transition timing again.
https://www.ros.org/reps/rep-2001.html#galactic-geochelone-may-2021-november-2022

Is the Bus ODD ready for the transition? Or should we wait a little more?

[xmfcx]

My proposal is first move to Humble and then upgrade CUDA libraries after the arm64 version is released.

If we don't upgrade, the CUDA dependant packages won't work for a while, isn't it bad?

So do you mean you are using Ubuntu 20.04 and Galactic for the bus now, right?

Yes.

[kenji-miyake]

If we don't upgrade, the CUDA dependant packages won't work for a while, isn't it bad?

@xmfcx It does work.
We can use Ubuntu 20.04 CUDA libraries for Ubuntu 22.04, and as I wrote in https://github.com/orgs/autowarefoundation/discussions/2622#discussioncomment-2910295, TIER IV has evaluated them with our data/vehicles.

[xmfcx]

@kenji-miyake Interesting, the comment link doesn't explain the process, is there a guide written somewhere for how we can use the old CUDA libraries in the Ubuntu 22.04?

[kenji-miyake]

Just install 20.04 libraries.
Please refer to #2692 and
https://github.com/autowarefoundation/autoware/blob/f9ca032b226e5dd4a983f2e6171af32237b5911f/ansible/roles/cuda/tasks/main.yaml.

There is a small hack to install 20.04 libraries on 22.04.
5dc0c2e

[xmfcx]

Thank you, we will try it out!

[xmfcx]

In the last ASWG meeting we discussed and following are the outputs:

• Currently we are still in the transition phase, galactic and humble are both supported.
• In 1st of December, we will deprecate galactic support, officially transition to humble.
• We will make a branch for galactic release with marked git hashes at the transition date.
• Both ITRI and Isuzu teams will work on making the transition until the deadline.

cc @hueirutseng @MertClk @mitsudome-r

[mitsudome-r]

I have done the upgrade of autoware main branch to Humble. Users should be able to install Humble version of Autoware by following the latest documentation.

For the changes made to the repository, please refer to this issue for the details.

For people who still need to work on Galactic, there is a galactic branch with the install instructions. However, we have no plans to actively sync galactic branch with the main branch so we strongly recommend you to switch over to Humble as soon as possible.

[kenji-miyake]

For Galactic users, please add --include-eol-distros when you rosdep update.

Related:

• Mark ROS 2 Galactic as end-of-life ros/rosdistro#35599
• https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/rosdep/blob/b6ad1896e89feff9c5328b7baa708187d790d1e1/src/rosdep2/sources_list.py#L500-L504
• https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/rosdep/blob/b6ad1896e89feff9c5328b7baa708187d790d1e1/src/rosdep2/main.py#L371

[LiangHuangBC]

AWSIM is still on Galatic.

[YoshinoriTsutake]

AWSIM is still on Galatic.

TIER IV has been developing AWSIM to support Humble.
Please wait for the official AWSIM version for Humble.