Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] ARM9?

[David Burgess]

Phillip -

On Nov 27, 2009, at 7:11 AM, Philip Balister wrote:

> On 11/26/2009 06:06 PM, David Burgess wrote:
> > Does anyone out there have experience building GNU Radio for AMR9  
> > with a
> > Linux 2.6 series kernel, the i.MX25 in particular?
>
> OE should build GNU Radio for ARM9. We ran it on the OpenMoko phone  
> a few years back, at least the dial tone example. I suppose I  
> should run a build to look for bitrot issues :) (Boost uses Intel  
> intrinsics for some atomic operations and I am not sure if we have  
> replacements for the ARM9 at the moment)

The last time I tried to use OE, I spent over a day downloading  
several GB of stuff completely unrelated to my needs, blew nearly a  
week trying to configure it, gave up, and installed Ubuntu on the  
target system.  So in my mind this is not an encouraging answer.  If  
OE is the only choice, is there someone I can *pay* to deal with that  
on a predictable schedule?

> The larger issue is lack of floating point support on the ARM9.  
> Floating point is tightly coupled in the GNU Radio code.

The only part of GNU Radio we are using is libusrp, but GNU Radio's  
"kitchen sink" dependencies mean that we have to build all kinds of  
other crazy stuff to get that, stuff that we do not actually use.   
(Seems to be a common theme here...)

We can write our own fixed point support for the rest of our  
application, if we can just get libusrp to work.  (Maybe the solution  
is a libusrp replacement that is independent of GNU Radio and builds  
with minimal external dependencies.)

> Philip


-- David

David A. Burgess
Kestrel Signal Processing, Inc.