Hey list, I have been itching to make some new gnuradio blocks that make use of volk. So to avoid disturbing the delicate balance of code in gnuradio-core, I have produced a new component called gr-basic.
The goal of gr-basic is to replace many of the blocks in gnuradio-core with vector optimized blocks that call into volk; and to make it easy for users to extend blocks to support new data types. You can see the branch here: http://gnuradio.org/cgit/jblum.git/log/?h=gr_basic So far, gr-basic has the familiar add, multiply, subtract and divide block, but with 2 major differences: 1) It is very easy to add new data types to these blocks. So it doesn't suffer from the confusing code generation or naming convention issues with the existing adder. So rather than generating gr_add_* for each data type, there is one block add, which takes as a parameter, the data type. 2) Some of the adder implementations use volk routines. We happened to already have a volk routine for adding floats, so rather than calling into the generic implementation, we call into a work function that calls the volk add routine, seen here: http://gnuradio.org/cgit/jblum.git/tree/gr-basic/lib/gr_basic_add.cc?h=gr_basic#n45 Just as a rough benchmark, you can expect a 30% savings in overhead from the adder (tested on a sse machine). I hope that this gives users a good starting point for optimizing gnuradio blocks with volk! -Josh _______________________________________________ Discuss-gnuradio mailing list Discuss-gnuradio@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnuradio
