GNU Radio and Gumstix

GNU Radio
1

Hi, has anyone had success porting GNU Radio to Gumstix? I would like
to
install it on the Overo Earth board (OMAP 3503 with ARM Cortex-A8) if
possible. I searched around but couldn’t find much written about this.
It
would nice to connect Gumstix to the USRP at least.

Any help would be appreciated,

Dan

2

On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 2:51 PM, Dan [email protected] wrote:

Hi, has anyone had success porting GNU Radio to Gumstix? I would like to
install it on the Overo Earth board (OMAP 3503 with ARM Cortex-A8) if
possible. I searched around but couldn’t find much written about this. It
would nice to connect Gumstix to the USRP at least.

Any help would be appreciated,

Philip B. has ported it to the beagle board and Open Embedded.

Some information can be found from this post:

http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg15542.html

Brian

3

On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 12:51 PM, Dan [email protected] wrote:

Hi, has anyone had success porting GNU Radio to Gumstix? I would like to
install it on the Overo Earth board (OMAP 3503 with ARM Cortex-A8) if
possible. I searched around but couldn’t find much written about this. It
would nice to connect Gumstix to the USRP at least.

If you have OE running for the Overo, running “bitbake gnuradio” should
work :slight_smile:

There’s more to it than that, but I need to set aside some time to
properly answer the question :slight_smile: Hopefully tonight.

Philip

4

On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 12:51 PM, Dan [email protected] wrote:

Hi, has anyone had success porting GNU Radio to Gumstix? I would like to
install it on the Overo Earth board (OMAP 3503 with ARM Cortex-A8) if
possible. I searched around but couldn’t find much written about this. It
would nice to connect Gumstix to the USRP at least.

At this years SDR Forum I did a demo of Gnu Radio running on the
Beagle Board (http://www.beagleboard.org). The Beagle Board is fairly
close to the gumstix overo product line.

You should be able to build gnuradio radio for the overo via
OpenEmbedded. I haven’t had time to try this, but I plan to in
February, if I can get some free time (as in no other paying work).

The list of issues at the moment:

  1. GNU Radio is obsessed with floating point :slight_smile: For my demo, I
    converted one of the FIR filters to use the NEON co-processor. GCC is
    not real good at genereating good code for NEON, so I used GCC inline
    assembly. The patch is here :

  2. The USRP code depends on knowing internal structures of
    libusb-0.12. Angstrom is using the libusb-1.0 code which breaks the
    USRP. I can build Angstrom with libusb-01.12, but it is a “nuisance”.
    We need to work though this issue anyway for GNU Radio to run as
    distros convert to libusb-1.0 anyway.

  3. The Overos have an EHCI host, which is the best place to attach the
    USRP, but you will need a hardware mod to make this interface work.
    Expect an email from Gumstix about this. In the past, I’ve had some
    success on the MUSB port also. This needs work.

  4. We need to add support in GNU Radio based on the patch in 1.

  5. I can run bits of “make check” by mounting the OE build dir via
    NFS, but there are some libtool issues to resolve.

  6. Convert more floating point to use NEON.

  7. Add better support to GNU Radio for suing data types other than
    float. (Maybe not as critical for the OMAP3, but there are some
    interesting platforms that would benefit from this)

  8. Future Gumstix products may use the OMAP3 with the DSP. (The Beagle
    already has the DSP) Moving algorithms to the DSP should be
    interesting. This DSP is not floating point, see 7.

Hopefully, this gives people an idea of how to migrate GNU Radio off
“big iron” onto smaller, lower power, hardware. I’m glad to answer
specific questions and do plan to work on OMAP3 support as I have
time.

Philip

5

On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 5:59 AM, Dan [email protected] wrote:

Okay, thanks for the help, we’ll start looking into it and maybe purchase a
beagle board for evaluation.

By the way, there doesn’t seem to be a link to the patch in 1) (unless I am
slow and this is some dark humor :wink:

I am slow …

http://cgit.openembedded.net/cgit.cgi?url=openembedded/tree/packages/gnuradio/gnuradio/gnuradio-neon.patch

I tested this on the Beagle Board, it should also work on the Gumstix
product. Hopefully, there is a Gumstix board with DSP at some point.

http://www.gumstix.net/User/view/Product-Roadmaps/Product-Roadmap-Overo/110.html

The 3530 part has the c64 based dsp.

The rev B Beagle (available now) does not have a working EHCI port.
Rev C (available around the end of March) will.

Philip

6

On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 8:21 AM, Philip B.
[email protected]wrote:

The rev B Beagle (available now) does not have a working EHCI port.
Rev C (available around the end of March) will.

Great, thanks again for the help, this should give us a good starting
point.

Dan

7

Okay, thanks for the help, we’ll start looking into it and maybe
purchase a
beagle board for evaluation.

By the way, there doesn’t seem to be a link to the patch in 1) (unless
I am
slow and this is some dark humor :wink:

Dan

On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 10:37 PM, Philip B.
<[email protected]

8

On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 2:51 PM, Dan [email protected] wrote:

Hi, has anyone had success porting GNU Radio to Gumstix? I would like to
install it on the Overo Earth board (OMAP 3503 with ARM Cortex-A8) if
possible. I searched around but couldn’t find much written about this. It
would nice to connect Gumstix to the USRP at least.

Any help would be appreciated,

OK, I’ve updated oe.dev so that you can build gnuradio (r10302) with
NEON implementation of the fff dotprod. I’m told the files should flow
into the overo build system soon also.

To build, (short form for people who can build their own sw), Edit the
gnuradio_svn.bb and boost_1.36.bb files and comment out the
DEFAULT_PREFERENCE=“-1” lines with a #.

bitbake gnuradio-image

wait a long time. After you get it loaded, start testing :slight_smile:
dial_tone.py should work and the benchmark for the fff dotproduct
should give you something like this:

balister@beagleboard:~/oe/tmp/work/armv7a-angstrom-linux-gnueabi/gnuradio-3.1.3+svnr10302-r6/trunk/gnuradio-core/src/tests$
./benchmark_dotprod_fff
generic: taps: 256 input: 4e+07 cpu: 1269.242 taps/sec:
8.068e+06
cortex_a8: taps: 256 input: 4e+07 cpu: 49.156 taps/sec: 2.083e+08

Note, I NFS mounted my home dir on teh beagle and ran the benchmark
command on the build machine first. This needs work :slight_smile:

Philip

9

On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 6:21 AM, Philip B.
[email protected] wrote:

I tested this on the Beagle Board, it should also work on the Gumstix
product. Hopefully, there is a Gumstix board with DSP at some point.

I did take a quick look at this over the weekend. We can build
gnuradio 3.1.2 with OE, but not the version in subversion, which I use
for adding the NEON code. I need to debug a problem finding python
headers or something.

Philip

10

On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 3:49 PM, Philip B.
[email protected]wrote:

wait a long time. After you get it loaded, start testing :slight_smile:
command on the build machine first. This needs work :slight_smile:

Philip

Okay, thanks again for the help, we will start looking into this
procedure
and hopefully have some good results :slight_smile:

Dan