Compares Technicolor firmware extracted from rbi files and shows the differences in the standard packages and any unpackaged files.

Decrypt the two firmware rbi files to be compared using https://github.com/seud0nym/decrypt-rbi (or if you prefer a GUI interface, use https://github.com/Ansuel/Decrypt_RBI_Firmware_Utility), and then extract their contents into 2 separate directories.

For example:

java -jar decrypt-rbi.jar firmware_1.rbi
java -jar decrypt-rbi.jar firmware_2.rbi

The resulting files (in this example firmware_1.bin and firmware_2.bin) are squashfs file systems. You can extract the contents from these files by using a utility such as p7zip.

For example:

/usr/bin/7z x -o'./firmware_1_extract' 'firmware_1.bin'
/usr/bin/7z x -o'./firmware_2_extract' 'firmware_2.bin'

This will create the firmware_1_extract and firmware_2_extract directories containing the firmware contents.

NOTE It is not recommended to extract the directories on a Windows system, as it requires a file system that supports case-sensitive file names.

Download the latest compare-rbi.jar release file and then run it by passing the paths to the two extracted directories. For example:

java -jar compare-rbi.jar ./firmware_1_extract ./firmware_2_extract

This will compare the directories and report differences in the system installed packages and any unpackaged files.

This will include packages where the version number has not changed, but the size of the package is different.

For example:

java -jar compare-rbi.jar -incpkgsizechanged ./firmware_1_extract ./firmware_2_extract

All files in the firmware extract must be read and their checksums computed, which is a time-consuming operation. If you are comparing the same firmware extract with other extracts, you can re-use the temporary cache to speed up processing. Otherwise, the cache will be rebuilt each time.

For example:

java -jar compare-rbi.jar -usecache ./firmware_1_extract ./firmware_3_extract