Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] inefficient large vectors

[Miklos Maroti]

Hi Marcus,

On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 12:00 PM, Marcus Müller <address@hidden> wrote:
> Just to add my two cents:
> Depending on your actual application, your large vectors might not actually
> quite fit the idea of "streams"; they might, for example, be a valid,
> decoded network packet or something of the like. If they don't need
> sample-synchronous handling, using messages to pass them around might work
> well.
> Downside of that is of course that you can't use your favourite GR block on
> messages. You break the sample synchronous architecture of a flowgraph with
> multiple paths from source(s) to sink(s); and if you convert from message to
> stream and back, you basically lose the vector attribute of your data (or
> run into the same problems as before).
> I can't really tell you much about computational performance of passing
> around large messages, however.
>
> On the other hand, you can reduce your per-block coding overhead for
> Martin's suggested tag-based solution:
> Write a base class that implements a input and output buffer and a minimal
> state machine based on stream tag evaluation. Let your blocks inherit from
> that. Always copy as many items from your general_work's input vector to
> your input buffer as you can, and copy as many samples from the output
> buffer to your general_works output vector as possible. Execute your
> computation when your input buffer is full and your output buffer empty.
> That way, you'll get a quasi-fixed relative rate, but get all the freedom
> and scheduling disadvantages of a general_work block with an itemsize of
> gr_complex (or whatever your data type is).
>
> I know from experience that this might be hard to debug. However, once your
> state machine is watertight, you're not very likely to run into issues
> later.

Thank you for the excellent advice. I did not thought of a generic
base class, which might help me. There is one block that produces one
vector of bytes (packet data) and one vector of ints (number of errors
corrected and uncorrected), which would be impossible to solve with a
stream since the output rate is not the same. Other than this, I think
your suggestion would work.

You say that there are scheduling disadvantages of a general_work
block. What are they? Sometimes I am running into issues with the
scheduler, but it is not clear how it really works, what should I try
to do and what should I try to avoid. Can you describe it in a few
words or give a pointer where I can read upon the technical (!!)
details.

Best,
Miklos

>
> Happy hacking,
> Marcus
>
>
> On 08/21/2013 07:59 PM, Miklos Maroti wrote:
>>
>> Hi!
>>
>> I have many sync blocks that work with large fixed size vectors, e.g.
>> converts one vector of size 12659 to another with size 18353. I have
>> just multiplied the sizeof(gr_complex) with 12659 and 18353 in the
>> signature. However, when the flow graph is running, then I get a
>> warning about paging: the circular buffer implementation allocates
>> large buffers (e.g. 4096 many to make the paging requirement). I do
>> not want really large buffers. I have implemented the whole thing with
>> padding, but that becomes also really inefficient, since when you want
>> to switch between vectors and streams, then you have to jump through
>> extra hoops with the padding. In a previous version I had streams
>> everywhere, but then there is absolutely no verification whether I
>> messed up the sizes of my "virtual vectors".
>>
>> So is there a way to work with large odd length vectors which does not
>> have this buffer allocation problem, and does not require padding? It
>> seems to me that it could be supported: regular streams but the vector
>> size would be verified separately at connection time and would not be
>> used to multiply the item size. Any advice is appreciated...
>>
>> Best,
>> Miklos
>>
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