Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] [GSoC] Co-Processors Update #9

[Alfredo Muniz]

Hey Philip, nice to have you back.

On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 10:06 AM, Philip Balister <address@hidden> wrote:

I doubt depending on contiguous memory will ever work for GNU Radio.
I've heard a lot of talk about changing the guts of GNU Radio, but no
real action. Especially given GNU Radios dependence on double mapped
buffering to handle wrap around.

What lead me to believe this would work was a little test that I ran. I basically had two blocks print their virtual address, the block on the left printed the write_pointer, block on right printed the read_pointer. From looking at the buffer QA tests, the write_pointer and read_pointer point to the buffers. What I observed was a giant buffer that contained three buffers inside it. So GNU Radio would write to one of the buffers during one cycle then move on to the next the next cycle until it wraps around after the third cycle. When it wraps around it starts at a different starting address for whatever reason but it is predictable. I suppose changing this behavior to actually use the same start addresses for each buffer would help.

On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 10:06 AM, Philip Balister <address@hidden> wrote:

I understand why TI drives you towards the CMEM driver, but that is a
lousy long term plan. They are just reusing code from prior generations
of drivers. And I do want to see something work so we can evaluate the
hard IP based GNU Radio block. My concern with your wording is that
people might think depending contiguous memory buffers is a good idea.

I can't use the CMEM driver since its GPLv2. I planned to write a much simpler driver that just allocates memory in the desired physical address which would be in some sort of shared memory. I think having the GNU Radio buffer described above in a known physical shared memory location can make the coprocessor interaction much easier since the coprocessor not having an MMU can interact with the buffer directly.