TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers is a port of TensorFlow Lite designed to run machine learning models on microcontrollers and other devices with only kilobytes of memory.
To learn how to use the framework, visit the developer documentation at tensorflow.org/lite/microcontrollers.
The remainder of this document provides guidance on porting TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers to new platforms. You should read the developer documentation first.
Since the core neural network operations are pure arithmetic, and don‘t require any I/O or other system-specific functionality, the code doesn’t have to have many dependencies. We‘ve tried to enforce this, so that it’s as easy as possible to get TensorFlow Lite Micro running even on ‘bare metal’ systems without an OS. Here are the core requirements that a platform needs to run the framework:
C/C++ compiler capable of C++11 compatibility. This is probably the most restrictive of the requirements, since C++11 is not as widely adopted in the embedded world as it is elsewhere. We made the decision to require it since one of the main goals of TFL Micro is to share as much code as possible with the wider TensorFlow codebase, and since that relies on C++11 features, we need compatibility to achieve it. We only use a small, sane, subset of C++ though, so don't worry about having to deal with template metaprogramming or similar challenges!
Debug logging. The core network operations don‘t need any I/O functions, but to be able to run tests and tell if they’ve worked as expected, the framework needs some way to write out a string to some kind of debug console. This will vary from system to system, for example on Linux it could just be fprintf(stderr, debug_string) whereas an embedded device might write the string out to a specified UART. As long as there's some mechanism for outputting debug strings, you should be able to use TFL Micro on that platform.
Math library. The C standard libm.a library is needed to handle some of the mathematical operations used to calculate neural network results.
Global variable initialization. We do use a pattern of relying on global variables being set before main() is run in some places, so you'll need to make sure your compiler toolchain supports this.
And that‘s it! You may be wondering about some other common requirements that are needed by a lot of non-embedded software, so here’s a brief list of things that aren't necessary to get started with TFL Micro on a new platform:
Operating system. Since the only platform-specific function we need is DebugLog(), there's no requirement for any kind of Posix or similar functionality around files, processes, or threads.
C or C++ standard libraries. The framework tries to avoid relying on any standard library functions that require linker-time support. This includes things like string functions, but still allows us to use headers like stdtypes.h which typically just define constants and typedefs. Unfortunately this distinction isn‘t officially defined by any standard, so it’s possible that different toolchains may decide to require linked code even for the subset we use, but in practice we‘ve found it’s usually a pretty obvious decision and stable over platforms and toolchains.
Dynamic memory allocation. All the TFL Micro code avoids dynamic memory allocation, instead relying on local variables on the stack in most cases, or global variables for a few situations. These are all fixed-size, which can mean some compile-time configuration to ensure there's enough space for particular networks, but does avoid any need for a heap and the implementation of malloc\new on a platform.
Floating point. Eight-bit integer arithmetic is enough for inference on many networks, so if a model sticks to these kind of quantized operations, no floating point instructions should be required or executed by the framework.
We recommend that you start trying to compile and run one of the simplest tests in the framework as your first step. The full TensorFlow codebase can seem overwhelming to work with at first, so instead you can begin with a collection of self-contained project folders that only include the source files needed for a particular test or executable. You can find a set of pre-generated projects here.
As mentioned above, the one function you will need to implement for a completely new platform is debug logging. If your device is just a variation on an existing platform you may be able to reuse code that‘s already been written. To understand what’s available, begin with the default reference implementation at tensorflow/lite/micro/debug_log.cc, which uses fprintf and stderr. If your platform has this level of support for the C standard library in its toolchain, then you can just reuse this. Otherwise, you‘ll need to do some research into how your platform and device can communicate logging statements to the outside world. As another example, take a look at the Mbed version of DebugLog(), which creates a UART object and uses it to output strings to the host’s console if it's connected.
Begin by navigating to the micro_error_reporter_test folder in the pregenerated projects you downloaded. Inside here, you‘ll see a set of folders containing all the source code you need. If you look through them, you should find a total of around 60 C or C++ files that compiled together will create the test executable. There’s an example makefile in the directory that lists all of the source files and include paths for the headers. If you're building on a Linux or MacOS host system, you may just be able to reuse that same makefile to cross-compile for your system, as long as you swap out the CC and CXX variables from their defaults, to point to your cross compiler instead (for example arm-none-eabi-gcc or riscv64-unknown-elf-gcc). Otherwise, set up a project in the build system you are using. It should hopefully be fairly straightforward, since all of the source files in the folder need to be compiled, so on many IDEs you can just drag the whole lot in. Then you need to make sure that C++11 compatibility is turned on, and that the right include paths (as mentioned in the makefile) have been added.
You'll see the default DebugLog() implementation in ‘tensorflow/lite/micro/debug_log.cc’ inside the micro_error_reporter_test folder. Modify that file to add the right implementation for your platform, and then you should be able to build the set of files into an executable. Transfer that executable to your target device (for example by flashing it), and then try running it. You should see output that looks something like this:
Number: 42 Badly-formed format string Another badly-formed format string ~~ALL TESTS PASSED~~~
If not, you'll need to debug what went wrong, but hopefully with this small starting project it should be manageable.
When we‘ve been porting to new platforms, it’s often been hard to figure out some of the fundamentals like linker settings and other toolchain setup flags. If you are having trouble, see if you can find a simple example program for your platform, like one that just blinks an LED. If you‘re able to build and run that successfully, then start to swap in parts of the TF Lite Micro codebase to that working project, taking it a step at a time and ensuring it’s still working after every change. For example, a first step might be to paste in your DebugLog() implementation and call DebugLog("Hello World!") from the main function.
Another common problem on embedded platforms is the stack size being too small. Mbed defaults to 4KB for the main thread‘s stack, which is too small for most models since TensorFlow Lite allocates buffers and other data structures that require more memory. The exact size will depend on which model you’re running, but try increasing it if you are running into strange corruption issues that might be related to stack overwriting.
The default reference implementations in TensorFlow Lite Micro are written to be portable and easy to understand, not fast, so you‘ll want to replace performance critical parts of the code with versions specifically tailored to your architecture. The framework has been designed with this in mind, and we hope the combination of small modules and many tests makes it as straightforward as possible to swap in your own code a piece at a time, ensuring you have a working version at every step. To write specialized implementations for a platform, it’s useful to understand how optional components are handled inside the build system.
We have adopted a system of small modules with platform-specific implementations to help with portability. Every module is just a standard .h header file containing the interface (either functions or a class), with an accompanying reference implementation in a .cc with the same name. The source file implements all of the code that‘s declared in the header. If you have a specialized implementation, you can create a folder in the same directory as the header and reference source, name it after your platform, and put your implementation in a .cc file inside that folder. We’ve already seen one example of this, where the Mbed and Bluepill versions of DebugLog() are inside mbed and bluepill folders, children of the same directory where the stdio-based debug_log.cc reference implementation is found.
The advantage of this approach is that we can automatically pick specialized implementations based on the current build target, without having to manually edit build files for every new platform. It allows incremental optimizations from a always-working foundation, without cluttering the reference implementations with a lot of variants.
To see why we‘re doing this, it’s worth looking at the alternatives. TensorFlow Lite has traditionally used preprocessor macros to separate out some platform-specific code within particular files, for example:
#ifndef USE_NEON #if defined(__ARM_NEON__) || defined(__ARM_NEON) #define USE_NEON #include <arm_neon.h> #endif
There’s also a tradition in gemmlowp of using file suffixes to indicate platform-specific versions of particular headers, with kernel_neon.h being included by kernel.h if USE_NEON is defined. As a third variation, kernels are separated out using a directory structure, with tensorflow/lite/kernels/internal/reference containing portable implementations, and tensorflow/lite/kernels/internal/optimized holding versions optimized for NEON on Arm platforms.
These approaches are hard to extend to multiple platforms. Using macros means that platform-specific code is scattered throughout files in a hard-to-find way, and can make following the control flow difficult since you need to understand the macro state to trace it. For example, I temporarily introduced a bug that disabled NEON optimizations for some kernels when I removed tensorflow/lite/kernels/internal/common.h from their includes, without realizing it was where USE_NEON was defined!
It’s also tough to port to different build systems, since figuring out the right combination of macros to use can be hard, especially since some of them are automatically defined by the compiler, and others are only set by build scripts, often across multiple rules.
The approach we are using extends the file system approach that we use for kernel implementations, but with some specific conventions:
TAGS="<foo>" on the command line when you use the main Makefile to build.The implementation of these rules is handled inside the Makefile, with a specialize function that takes a list of reference source file paths as an input, and returns the equivalent list with specialized versions of those files swapped in if they exist.
Clearly, getting debug logging support is only the beginning of the work you‘ll need to do on a particular platform. It’s very likely that you‘ll want to optimize the core deep learning operations that take up the most time when running models you care about. The good news is that the process for providing optimized implementations is the same as the one you just went through to provide your own logging. You’ll need to identify parts of the code that are bottlenecks, and then add specialized implementations in their own folders. These don't need to be platform specific, they can also be broken out by which library they rely on for example. Here's where we do that for the CMSIS implementation of integer fast-fourier transforms. This more complex case shows that you can also add helper source files alongside the main implementation, as long as you mention them in the platform-specific makefile. You can also do things like update the list of libraries that need to be linked in, or add include paths to required headers.