Hi group, I recently joined the group, because I downloaded the meta-ros layer and wanted to share my experience with ROS on an OpenEmbedded Linux. The initial compilation went through without any serious issue. So good job :-) After installing all required packages I could finally start roscore on my Galileo board. Unfortunately there I ran into some serious performance limitations. Booting roscore on my EeePC (I use for prototyping) requires only some seconds. On the Galileo board it took me more than a minute, so I ran into a timeout. This I could finally avoid by adapting the py-script, but even when roscore started afterwards I could not query any topics or do anything with my running ROS.
One bottleneck was easily identified to be the SD-card connected to the Quark-CPU. I tried to shift all required files to a tmpfs into RAM and could achieve a significant speed boost. Unfortunately it is still too slow to be usable. I would be interested in the performance level of your hardware you are using ROS with. Best case would be, that I finally find out that I just forgot to move some important files to my tmpfs, so I am facing still the same bottleneck. Worst case would of course be, that the CPU performance is just not sufficient for this python based environment... Some HW stats of my OpenEmbedded System: 400 MHz x86 Quark CPU 256 MB RAM 8 GB SD card Regards Christoph
