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Running headless

Headless

By default, AWSIM is a standard windowed application. This is core functionality and essential for running the simulation manually on a local PC with an attached display, but it starts to be problematic for CI and testing on the cloud instances.

Unity provides a few options for running binaries headless, but all of them have two things in common:

  • they still require a window server (X11 on Linux), or
  • they disable the support for GPU devices.

Since AWSIM requires GPU for sensor simulation, it is required to use 3rd party utilities. The best utility for that is Xvfb.

Headless with Xvfb is only supported on Ubuntu

Xvfb

Xvfb, which stands for "X Virtual Framebuffer", is a display server implementing the X11 display server protocol. It enables the running of graphical applications without the need for a physical display by creating a virtual frame buffer in memory.

This tool is transparent for the AWSIM and the pipeline in which it is working and can be conveniently used to mimic the headless functionalities.

Installing

Xvfb is a standard Ubuntu package and can be installed with apt:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install xvfb

Running the AWSIM with Xvfb

To run the AWSIM binary, all that is needed to do, is to prefix the command with xvfb-run:

xvfb-run ./AWSIM.x86_64

Please note that xvfb-run comes with multiple options, like choosing the virtual screen size or color palette. Please see the manual for all the options.