[beagleboard] Does the Angstrom Distribution Actually Use The BeagleBoard's DSP?

GoogleGroups
1

Can anyone tell me whether or not the Angstrom distro for the
BeagleBoard actually uses any of the OMAP3530's DSP resources? I'm
trying to get an idea of how much of the DSP's capability is available
for, say, an SDR application. At the moment, it looks like none of the
DSP is required for ordinary operation of the board under Linux.

Thanks, Steve

2

There are, of course, explicitly built applications that do utilize
the DSP, through the dsplink or dspbridge kernel modules. But..

At the moment, it looks like none of the
DSP is required for ordinary operation of the board under Linux.

To my knowledge, this statement is correct.

Yaman

3

If you use the gstreamer-ti plugins the dsp will be used for multimedia. But you are free to use the DSP for anything you want.

regards,

Koen

4

Hi Steve,

Can anyone tell me whether or not the Angstrom distro for the
BeagleBoard actually uses any of the OMAP3530's DSP resources? I'm
trying to get an idea of how much of the DSP's capability is available
for, say, an SDR application. At the moment, it looks like none of the
DSP is required for ordinary operation of the board under Linux.

You are right - As such the DSP isn't used for any "vital operation" in any
of the distributions (Angstrom, Ubuntu, Debian, etc.) The DSP is today
mainly used for video playback, but as such it's free to be used for
whatever you like (in case you don't need video-playback you have a 100%
free DSP for SDR :-)...

Best regards - Good luck
  Søren

5

I had a student team do an SDR on the Beagle. However they didn't
need to use the DSP.

They interfaced a SoftRock 6.3 [1] transceiver, which operates on the
40M, 20M and 10M ham bands, to the Beagle. They used a port of fldigi
[2] to decode the signals.

--Mark

[1] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/softrock40/
[2] Page Redirection

6

Thanks for the info; I'll check it out.
Just now, I'm starting to look at the OSSIE SDR core framework; I have
some little experience with SCA software-radio core frameworks (think
of this as a mini-operating system for SDRs), and it looks like it
could be extended to support code on both the DSP and ARM sides. While
it's certainly true (and convenient!) that the Beagle's ARM processor
is powerful enough to do many SDR processing tasks without the DSP, I
think there are some awesome performance gains to be had by exploiting
the DSP core. I'm told the OMAP was originally conceived for smart
phones, so the right capabilities are certainly there.

-- Steve