Hi Troy,
Some quick answers:
Your hardware is pretty typical, and the same or similar hardware has
been used before.
(e.g. 4dsp). AFAIK, the commtech board is targeted by one other
project. I don't know the status.
There is a significant body of work on time synchronization that isn't
fully reflected in the
published materials (although some is, e.g.
doc/OpenCPI_HDL_Infrastructure.pdf, and OpenCPI_Time_Performance.pdf).
Some users use UBuntu - we have fixed some issues that arose out of
Ubuntu users reports. Nothing significant.
Maybe you can become the standard UBuntu tester :-).
There is a partially implemented Hudson server setup for OpenCPI that
can reach out to test platforms etc.
I'm not sure what you are referring to with regards to unimplemented
features in the specification documents.
(Of course there are some...).
Platform selection is all about whether a "difference" is a matter of
testing, tweaking and defect fixing (sometimes painful, sometimes
trivial) or adding very new specific infrastructure features. In your
list below, the only ones that fall into the latter category seem to be:
Lyrtech AMC - memories other than DDR3.
Lyrtech RF FMC - requires a newish "device worker" for control
For things like 4DSP FMC's, users have not used the 4DSP IP, but
directly used the OpenCPI IP.
For time, the PPS support in the FPGAs can be augmented with software
handling of "seconds" to avoid the necessity
of supporting IRIG in the FPGA, but that's another issue. FPGA support
of PPS is there.
The field system is "trivial" logically, but even trivial things like
that can take some time getting it all to work, especially
all the front-end stuff that needs good lab equipment to test.
Since OpenCPI is an open community, the "roadmap" for platforms is
whatever contributors want to support.
It is pretty safe to assume that the latest development boards from
Xilinx and Altera will be supported, and the
RHEL support will probably progress to RHEL 6 soon. There is growing
need to support Ubuntu. If we can establish
a particular target release to add to the test list that won't be hard.
PCIe gen2x8 is a small thing logically, since the OpenCPI FPGA code
doesn't really change to support it (it is fast/wide enough). However,
both Xilinx and Altera have had some issues getting it to work, so that
again would be a testing/tweaking issue.
The bugzilla is getting started and will be increasingly used in the future.
The forum was hacked and was shut down. We need to establish a more
secure one.
There will be a fairly major release in late January that will inject
the results of current development projects that include
more/better GPU support, more benchmarking, and DDS and SDR/SCA integration.
Jim
On 12/8/11 12:39 AM, Ziersch, Troy (Contractor) wrote:
UNCLASSIFIED
Hi,
The team I am part of is currently researching the possibly of a
standard signal processing development platform for a government
research department.
An initial review of your documents has shown that OpenCPI seems to meet
our requirements for a middleware.
The platforms we are targeting are your i7/ML605 reference platform for
development and a uTCA platform for field trials.
The field trial platform will consist of the follow or similar:
- i7 quad core CPU, 8G RAM, PCIe Gen II x8 :
http://www.gocct.com/sheets/AM/am31xx0x.htm
- Xilinx V6 FPGA AMC, PCIe Gen II x8 :
http://www.lyrtech.com/products/perseus_601x.php
- One of these FMC
o 8 x 250 Msam/sec ADC :
http://www.4dsp.com/FMC108.php
o 4/2/1 x 1.25/2.5/5 Gsam/sec ADC :
http://www.4dsp.com/FMC125.php
o 2 x 1 Gsam ADC, 2 x 1 Gsam DAC :
http://www.4dsp.com/FMC110.php
o RF Transceiver :
http://www.lyrtech.com/products/radio420x.php
Or preference for time synchronisation is Precision Time Protocol (IEEE
1588) for CPUs and 10MHz/PPS for FPGAs provided by the following or
similar:
- Meinberg LANTIME PTP
- http://www.meinberg.de/english/products/lantime-m600-mrs-ptpv2.htm
The use of PTP requires a recent version of the Linux kernel and we
prefer a distribution which has all pre-requisites available as
packages. Thus our preferred Linux distribution is Ubuntu 10.11.
It appears that Ubuntu and PCIe Gen II x8 are not currently supported by
OpenCPI.
So some initial questions we have are:
- When is the next stable release due?
- How much of the specification documents will be implemented for the
next release?
- Are there any technical issues when selecting a platform that we
need to be aware of?
- How trivial is it to update OpenCPI to support the field trial
platform?
- Is there a roadmap available for platform support (OS, FPGA cards,
FMC cards, Fabrics)?
- The bug tracking tool at opencpi.org seems unused, is there an
alternative being used?
- The forum at opencpi.prg appears to be broken
Any help will be much appreciated.
Cheers,
Troy
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