rpi-open-firmware VS sbts-install

Comment by the developer who attempted to create open firmware, https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware/issues/37

> a lot of corners were cut to save time leading to what I believe is poor ARMv7+ Cortex IP integration (GIC, TrustZone, etc). So I stopped working on it. If those things were not the case (GIC working, "TZPCs" working, security working as intended, instead of NS forced to high on bridge, at least in my understanding) I would still work on it ...

ARM isn't a second class citizen on this platform, it's a third class citizen since BCM2709 (again this is an opinion) ... the features I wanted to tinker with the most are absent by design (cutting corners) and I'm not willing to resort to SW emulation of them through clever uses of the VPU.

Sure, and it's been done: https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware - but that doesn't involve ThreadX source, just some standard reverse engineering work. ThreadX is really the least interesting part of this whole operation in terms of the Raspberry Pi.

It's very cool that ThreadX has been open sourced as it offers an additional battle tested and mature alternative to FreeRTOS for new projects, but in terms of reverse engineering or open sourcing the Raspberry Pi VideoCore blob, it's pretty much a non-event IMO.

I guess you are thinking of this issue:

https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware/issues/37

Since then the project moved to a new maintainer (not me), who worked on it slowly but surely. They need new contributors though.

They have (https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware). The problem is that almost nothing works (no video or even USB). The sequel to "f you, NVIDIA": f you, Broadcom.

> no clue if there's a project to reimplement that

There was! And it even booted Linux in some capacity: https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware

> every chip is very different from one another

Eh, the usual embedded SoCs are not that different from each other — ARM GIC, ARM timer, lots of Synopsys Designware crap for SDMMC/XHCI/PCIe/etc.

For many SoCs it's totally feasible to make standards-compliant firmware, e.g. for the Rockchip RK3566 there is https://github.com/jaredmcneill/quartz64_uefi

And SoCs from the networking world (Marvell, NXP) are typically supported by upstream EDK2.

from 2018: Is this project dead? KB - No not dead but on hold, see my response · Issue #37

https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware/issues/37

Back in 2011 I made a commercial product that ran on the earliest plug computers from global scale technologies. I only sold 20 of 'em and every single one of them was being returned with SD card corruption problems. I had to quickly pivot to keeping the rootfs read-only. I've been a fan ever since.

Incidentally, that early commercial product was a home security product with a very small amount of home automation. I released this into open source with a new name in 2021 and now runs on the Jetson series SBCs (https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-install). Except then including high end YOLO models as triggers.

Because it was intended to be a standalone product it supported https with a GUI wrapper around all of the certificate operations. This still exists in my open source version, making it easy to use self signed certificates for intra-device rest calls.

But I've kept and expanded upon the multi-partition memory overlayFS approach and the installation of this system first asks you to install the sbts-base system, which installs the multi-partition memory overlayFS so that other's can use this as their own base systems.

Is anyone else using the StalkedByTheState security system? It runs on Jetson SBCs and works with the full sized yolov6 and yolov7 models.

Super proactive detection and response

https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-install

I use StalkedByTheState (https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-install) with 15 cameras all being evaluated with an NVIDIA GPU with large model yolov6 and matches double checked with large yolov7. Practically never get a false positive in a complex environment and never get a miss. The port to the Orin series still needs to be completed though.

Sweet! If you are prepared to spend more for more GPU compute power from Jetson SBCs you could use larger models. I’m busy adding the

https://www.deepfaune.cnrs.fr/

model to my security system software

https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-install

It’s almost there but still have to finish the install scripts for the Orin series.

The deep fauna model can be used for all of France’s fauna which includes foxes and badgers (and wolves, bears, lynxes and more of course).

Nice that you should say that :) I also wrote a home automation system.

Well... actually, it's a kinda burglar alarm except it's focus is alerting way ahead of actually getting inside. I added home automation bits (minimal) just so one can elicit a real world response, but I do use it for minimal home automation (Lights, heating control and letting the chickens in and out).

I have yet to announce on on hacker news and so because I still have to write a bunch of documentation. It uses the latest state of the art computer vision triggering, currently yolov7 and I'm about to release support for yolov6. It's multimodel, so you can double check it's result with more than one model, even for specific parts of an image.

The architecture diagam and installation instructions are here:

https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-install

I actually, started writing this in 2008 and most of the current state in terms of the user interface were finished in 2012 but I only released it into open source last year really. In 2019 I add support for yolov3 and have been adding models even since.

It's written in Java and installs in just two commands on nvidia jetsons at the moment (Not in containers). The inference framework is a simple websocket based wrapper around other models so it's easy to add new models and that's written in python.

Well I finish the new release to introduce yolov6 and support for the seeed studios platforms I'll make an announcement on hacker news, note I still have a lot of work to do on documentation.