Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Vista, Xp, or Linux?

[Don Ward]

Hi Kevin,

> 1) Has anyone had any luck installing GNURadio under Vista using Cygwin or
> MinGW method?

I haven't tried Vista.  I don't expect it to be different from XP, but we 
won't know until someone tries it.

> 2) Are there any performance issues running GNURadio under windows (XP or
> Vista) as opposed to Linux?

It is certainly easier to install GNU Radio on Linux, but it does work under 
both Cygwin and MinGW as well.

I mostly run the MinGW version but have also built and tested it under 
Cygwin and Debian Linux.  For my application the MinGW version is the 
fastest (50-60% of cpu time), the Cygwin version is the slowest (70-80% of 
cpu), and the Linux version is somewhere in between.  I haven't tracked down 
what causes the difference; it could be something as simple (and fixable) as 
compile options for FFTW or as complicated (and difficult to fix) as 
graphics display speed.

One advantage of Windows is that you can set the priority of the thread that 
processes USRP data to eliminate overruns and data processing hiccups caused 
by window management and display events without noticeable impact on GUI 
responsiveness.  I think the only option on Linux is to use realtime 
priority, which requires root access; I don't know if this affects GUI 
responsiveness.

My impression is that Windows isn't so good if you need low latency, but I 
can't quantify (or even verify) that.

-- Don