Hi all E310/E312/E313 users,
I would like to focus people's attention to some changes we have just started rolling out, and will continue to roll out over the next months. Executive Summary ================= - For those requiring *no* RFNoC support whatsoever, just plain RX/TX and UHD support, we recommend sticking with the 3.9 LTS version of UHD for now (this advice is for the E310/E312/E313 only!). - Going forward, we will be moving the E310 to a more modern RFNoC architecture, and start incorporating things we've learned from other embedded USRPs. - However, this means that certain features (most importantly, network mode) will be unavailable for the time being on newer UHD versions until the transition is complete. Full Story ========== As we've rolled out the USRP N310 and other devices using embedded Linux, we have gotten a little smarter with respect to OpenEmbedded and other embedded-Linux related topics. For example, the USRP N310 features the MPM architecture, which moves a lot of the hardware controls onto the device itself, as opposed to toggling every bit in every register from within UHD, and we have a better way of creating file systems which makes it easier for us to upgrade to newer OE and kernel versions. The USRP E310, even though it was released years ago, is still a great product, with an amazing form factor. Unfortunately, its software design hasn't kept up with the times, and the currently shipping filesystems have fairly old kernels, among other things. Over the course of the next few months, we intend to remedy that. We will be taking the following steps: 1. Port all RFNoC code from E310 onto master branch. This means we no longer support different architectures between the master and rfnoc-devel branches (note: On X310, we did this for the 3.10 release). The main downside of this is that it will disable network mode (i.e., the ability to run the E310 like an N210, with UHD running on a host computer, over Ethernet). 2. Forward-port the E310 code to the same OE release as we use for N310. Since this entails a major kernel upgrade, it will take some time to have all the power management up to date. There may be periods of time where the E312 (the battery-powered version) will have reduced capabilities. We will send out more updates when we know more. 3. Forward-port the E310 code the same UHD software architecture as the N310. Once this is complete, network mode will be back in place, albeit with more capabilities. For RFNoC development in particular, this will be useful, because full RFNoC support will be made available over network mode (the bandwidth limitations for E310 network will remain the same, we expect a nominal sampling rate of 1 Msps over network mode). Timeline ======== We plan to complete these steps by the end of 2018. The first step, however, has already been completed on master branch: Here, the E310 has already been synchronized with the code from rfnoc-devel. Once this transition is complete, we will be able to keep providing updates for the E310 more easily than before, and they will stay in lockstep with the N310 filesystem releases. Note that since we're merging all of this into master branch, there will be intermediate releases of UHD with different feature sets for the E310. Which branch/release should I run? ================================== If you are using none of the RFNoC features, i.e., you are simply doing send() and recv() calls, then we recommend sticking with the UHD-3.9.LTS branch. If you are doing RFNoC development, then simply move from rfnoc-devel to master branch, and everything else stays the same. Why do all of this on master branch? ==================================== We could have considered running a side-branch (e310-devel or something like that) to do all of these changes. However, our experience with rfnoc-devel was that this actually delays the release of features, and we have the safety net of the UHD-3.9.LTS branch. Also, one of the main reasons to do this is to share code with other USRPs, and it's a lot easier to keep things shared when you're only developing code on the same branch. Please let us know if you have any questions. Regards, Martin Braun _______________________________________________ USRP-users mailing list USRP-users@lists.ettus.com http://lists.ettus.com/mailman/listinfo/usrp-users_lists.ettus.com
