Co-Processor Support in Open Source Operating Systems and libraries(GSOC 2016)

Google Summer of Code
1

Hello everyone,
My name is Vaibhav Choudhary.I am in my second year of engineering pursuing Electronics and Communications Engineering.
I would love to contribute to the BeagleBone community and participate in GSOC. In particular ,I am interested in working to enable usage of various platforms like Arduino,MSP430,PRU’s etc with the BeagleBone,as mentioned on the Ideas Page.

I am proficient with C/C++ and have a working knowledge of Python.
I have been working in Texas Instruments Centre for Embedded Product Design(TI-CEPD),in my college and have had experience in working with
PRU’s on the BeagleBone,Arduino ,as well as have had some exposure to MSP430.

Does the project demand coding something like the Firmata library for Arduino ,for the BeagleBone?
Can someone please guide me and tell me how I should begin contributing and participating in GSOC for BeagleBone ?

Thanking-You
Vaibhav Choudhary
NSIT,University of Delhi

2

Hello everyone,
I just had some doubts regarding this idea.
Does the Project expect,for example, just enabling UART communication between BeagleBone and Arduino or
writing library functions to enable multiprocessing?
By library functions,I mean Python or C functions that could be called by the user or maybe even automatically called to reduce load on the BeagleBone.

I am a beginner at this so please excuse any erroneous assumption on my part.

Thanking-You
Vaibhav Choudhay
NSIT,University of Delhi

3

Check out the 2015 ideas page for more specific ideas under that theme: http://elinux.org/BeagleBoard/GSoC/Ideas-2015#Heterogeneous_co-processor_support_in_open_source_operating_systems_and_libraries

A couple of them were worked on last year: http://elinux.org/BeagleBoard/GSoC/2015_Projects

The focus should be on solutions that can be merged upstream to mainline Linux.

4

Thanks for the reply.
All the ideas mentioned under this topic last year are all related to PRU. There is no mention of Arduino ,MSP430 or other platforms.
So the focus this year is only on the ideas mentioned last year ,that is,only related to PRU?
If not,could you please tell me what exactly is expected from this project this year?
(Please refer to my question which I asked earlier)

Thanking you
Vaibhav Choudhary

5

Well, I think we really want to target upstreaming something to mainline Linux, and I don’t know that there’s a place for a firmata type thing there.

The PRU is an example of a powerful coprocessor that some complex tasks could potentially be offloaded to - my understanding is that that’s the type of coprocessor that this project is really about improving support for, which I suppose means improving things like remoteproc, etc… I doubt an interface to an 8-bit micro would ever be accepted in mainline.

Of course I could totally be on the wrong page here - other mentors?