[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] DSP programming

[From: Simon Pickering]

Thanks for your thoughts about the IVA, over lunch I did some more googling and
found a couple of non-authoritative posts about it. Looks like it might be a
separate processor like the DSP, with its own kernel (not sure whether this is
changeable).

See:
http://linux.omap.com/pipermail/linux-omap-open-source/2007-April/009494.html
And:
http://www.learn4good.com/jobs/language/english/search_resumes/computer/macedoni
a/cv/108935/ (scroll down & search for "IVA")

Still no idea where these people got their information from. Interestingly, I'd
expected the Ti supplied kernel source to have more stuff related to the IVA in
it, but there's not much at all other than some power management and clock
setting code. I've not searched in it for the DSP, perhaps the kernel is
relatively bare in terms of these peripherals, leaving that up to whomever
decides to use it with Linux.

>  Thanks for your continued efforts in the DSP hacking.  The 
> more we know, the more fun we can with specific codecs and 
> other projects, although it sounds as if the latency in 
> pushing the data back and forth to the DSP can be a limiting factor.

This is a good point and needs some testing. If the data are only sent one way
(e.g. sound data processed then output directly) then this is not a major issue,
depending on the rate at which it's processed vs. memory vs. transfer speed,
etc., but if it's bi-directional then I agree, it might not be very useful.

We'll have to test and see :)


Simon