Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ Toolkit
Community assistance about the Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ toolkit, OpenCV, and all aspects of computer vision-related on Intel® platforms.
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ARMv6 build of the inference engine and Myriad plugin

G__Simon
Beginner
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Hi,

Any chance of having an **armv6l** build of the inference engine ? Is there any limitations that prevent it from being just a recompilation with the appropriate flags ?

I'd like to get an NCS working on a Raspberry Pi Zero, which architecture is ARMv6.

Many thanks,
Simon

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Dmitry_K_Intel3
Employee
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Hi, Simon!

As you can see there are two libraries in the package: OpenCV and Inference Engine. OpenCV's cross compilation toolchain is just more flexible for now and as far as I know, you can run OpenCV from OpenVINO for RPI package as with ARMv7 as with ARMv6 (let me check it this weekend).

 

I think the problem for now is to align OpenCV and Inference Engine toolchains and in the future releases we can rename raspbian_9/armv7l to raspbian_9/armhf.

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G__Simon
Beginner
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Hi Dmitry !

Thanks a lot for your answer !

Just to give you some context, I'm trying to run the object detection sample from this installation guide on a Raspberry Pi Zero (which is armv6 instead of armv7 as required by the guide). So I'm not using OpenCV for now.

Do you mean I should be able to run the examples on my Pi Zero with a Neural Compute Stick 1 ? Correct me if I'm mistaken but the Myriad plugin shared library used by the inference engine has been compiled for armv7 processors. If that is not the case, that means I have a compilation issue on my side and I should be able to solve it.

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Dmitry_K_Intel3
Employee
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Simon,

Most likely you'll catch "Illegal instruction" error if you'll try to run Inference Engine binaries on ARMv6.

I haven't tried to replace "-march=armv7-a" to something different so I cannot say if there is a workaround. For now OpenVINO package for ARM is tested only for ARMv7 CPU arch (can be checked from output of "cat /proc/cpuinfo").

If you'll able to run it - please share your steps so we can add it to the guide.

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G__Simon
Beginner
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Thanks for your insight Dmitry. Indeed I tried to build the samples with the proper march flag it and caught the "Illegal instruction" error. :(

I'm now trying to recompile the inference engine from the Github repository with the proper architecture and I'll just drop the precompiled Myriad plugin in there... I don't have much hope though.

So my initial question remains but is more narrowed down I think: would it be possible to release an ARMv6 version of the Myriad plugin for which we don't have access to the source code ?

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Dmitry_K_Intel3
Employee
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Simon, so let's wait for the future releases. I either have two RPI boards with ARMv6 and two Google AIY Vision Kits (RPI Zero) so I'd like to use OpenVINO with it.

 

As for me, even with access to the source code it's better to have pre-built binaries.

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G__Simon
Beginner
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Any idea on a possible release date ? We are on a rather tight schedule so I might need to evaluate alternative solutions in the mean time.

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Dmitry_K_Intel3
Employee
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Simon, I haven't seen any release schedules yet. I just can promise that I'll try to test current package with ARMv6 on weekends.

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G__Simon
Beginner
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OK, thanks a lot Dmitry ! :) I'll let you know if I manage to get the current package working.

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julien_c
Beginner
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Would be very interested in armv6 support too. For now, OpenVino seems like a regression compared to the NCSDK when it comes to Movidius NCS support.

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Dmitry_K_Intel3
Employee
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Hi Simon and Julien!

According to this page: https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi we cannot use Debian 9 image (which was used for cross-compilation of current RPI package) for armv6. That means current release of OpenVINO for Raspberry Pi works only with Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3 (ARMv7 CPU as mentioned in the install guide).

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Deblauwe__Tom
Beginner
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julien_c wrote:

Would be very interested in armv6 support too. For now, OpenVino seems like a regression compared to the NCSDK when it comes to Movidius NCS support.

Better for compiling networks, worse for running them, I agree on that!

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julien_cl
Beginner
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Hello,

Any update on this ?

 

Best,

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Benke__Laszlo
Beginner
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Hi Dmitry Kurtaev (Intel),

I am also curious about armv6 build. Is it possible or should not we expect in the near future?

Thank you.

Regards,

Laci

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