Jetson Nano BSP

[Karel Gardas]

Hi Prakhar,

On 2/23/23 20:23, Prakhar Agrawal wrote:
> I completely agree with all your points, but my rationale for 
> introducing the jetson nano or jetson AGX orin was because of their GPU 
> power.

it's really nice what Nvidia achieved here, right? Unfortunately this 
GPU potential is fully locked up by binary driver NVidia provides only 
for selected number of platforms --- if not just for the only one: 
Linux. So very questionable how you would unlock that on RTEMS during 
the limited time of GSoC. Just see what Nouveau folks are doing: 
https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/ -- for years and they just barely got 
to 3D acceleration. Just clone their git repo, see number of patches, 
lines of code provided and number of people involved and I think you 
will get an idea how mamooth task this is...

> 
> In the case of large hobby projects or maybe the initial days of a 
> startup(seed ones), a real-time system that can work with boards having 
> good GPU can do wonders.
> For example, for an autonomous vehicle L2, L3 autonomy can be achieved 
> using a 60W Jetson AGX orin, hence if RTEMS support is added to the 
> board, it might help create an awesome system to handle all the critical 
> time constraints necessary for the vehicle and give it the ability to 
> coordinate a large number of concurrent activities.

If you are interested in machine vision based on AI and robotics, why 
not to look around for more open-source friendly solution? Recently just 
found i.MX 8M Plus and their claimed 2.3 TOPS NPU. Certainly not that 
powerful like NVidia, but NXP is historically more friendly to 3rd party 
OSes. Not sure about NPU, have not had a time to investigate that yet, 
but perhaps you do?

Also, with i.MX 8M Plus you still do have a chance to use AI Vision in 
non-real time manner running on top of Linux and run RTEMS real-time 
tasks on built in Cortex-M7 -- I mean if you decide that this particular 
BSP may be your GSoC. :-)

https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-microcontrollers/arm-processors/i-mx-applications-processors/i-mx-8-applications-processors/i-mx-8m-plus-arm-cortex-a53-machine-learning-vision-multimedia-and-industrial-iot:IMX8MPLUS

>> Honestly I'd rather see a new BSP for a decent RISC-V board.
> 
> I was reading about RISC-V and their comparison with ARM SBC and in one 
> blog I read this - "ARM processors have benefited from a lot more 
> research, funding, and development than RISC-V. This means that it can 
> be argued that RISC-V is being left behind"

Do not worry about it. RISC-V is here and will stay. A lot was already 
invested into it and much more will still be...

Karel