On 05/17/2010 04:45 PM, HR Myler wrote: > > After seeing a post by Josh Blum stating that I should run HUD because > he thought that since "the usrp2 gnuradio driver has a linux specific > packet ring, and therefore wont work on a bsd environment." I was > momentarily outraged. Does it not often seem that if you are not > running what (the ubiquitous) "they" are running the answer is always > the same? Go get on a different system is just the easy way out. > When developing software these days, it's important to start out life by picking the environment most likely to be broadly useful *first*. Eliminating windows for a second, that leaves Linux. While it's true that it's possible to build many classes of applications in such a way that they're utterly-portable from OS-to-OS, it's hard, and it's harder when the application has to touch anything other than a highly-abstracted interface to the filesystem, and few rigidly-standardized applications APIs.
It's not a big surprise to me that some of the bits 'n pieces of the Gnu Radio network interface code use some Linux-specific networking "stuff". You are using a VM that may, or may not, faithfully mimic the behaviour of real hardware. That's not the environment that Gnu Radio was developed on, so it should hardly be surprising that the kinds of "weird cases" produced by a VM environment haven't been tested-for, or accounted for. The kinds of combinatorial explosions that happen in code when the code *does* try to account for "all possible barriers to correct functionality" are truly hideous, and lead to code that is profoundly hard to maintain--speaking from agonizing experience. Over and over again. For the past 31 years. Consider a reductio ad absurdium argument. What if there was hardware out there that couldn't add certain numbers properly, and occasionally didn't do multiplies correctly? Software generally assumes that when you add 2+2, you get four. It generally doesn't need to verify that the underlying CPU is actually sane. But one *could* argue that software should perhaps be robust in the face of impossible odds, and do such checks, perhaps only when it detects "weirdo environment number 57". But it's easy to see how quickly such a piece of software becomes elephantine and unmanageable. Probably the *right* thing for MacOS, is to have native ports of the Gnu Radio code, and UHD, and so on. I think basic Gnu Radio functionality is already available on MacOS, so some keener with BSD experience could perhaps lend a hand and get UHD running natively on MacOS/*BSD. -- Principal Investigator Shirleys Bay Radio Astronomy Consortium http://www.sbrac.org _______________________________________________ Discuss-gnuradio mailing list Discuss-gnuradio@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnuradio
