28 comments

  • mandiantBob a day ago ago

    This looks along the same lines as CyberEther, though CyberEther does have alot more features to enable massive compute of raw data and arguably nicer gui.(https://github.com/luigifcruz/CyberEther)

  • Retr0id a day ago ago

    Is this GNU Radio vibe-ported to rust? How does it compare?

    • Joel_Mckay a day ago ago

      In general, any llvm compiled language is going to have persistent unpredictable jitter related issues. Only the naive think Rust is a replacement for C/C++, but the same issues also occur with clang compilers for the same reasons.

      They now have 2 DSP problems by porting to llvm languages like Rust, but will insist their work isn't worse than the C they attempted to "upgrade". =3

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability#Electronic_circu...

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ

      • vrighter 12 hours ago ago

        any code in any language in any paradigm will have unpredictable jitter on any superscalar out of order processor. Which is all of them in phones and desktops.

      • ErroneousBosh a day ago ago

        > In general, any llvm compiled language is going to have persistent unpredictable jitter related issues.

        So if I compiled my own SDR software written in C with LLVM/Clang, it would suddenly have jitter issues?

        Can you explain why?

        • Joel_Mckay a day ago ago

          In C, even without inline assembly or "volatile" to gaurentee the same code motion every time, it is still possible to bake what is placed in "register" a priori.

          In llvm binaries, the code is abstracted/re-ordered, optimized/deduplicated, and flow may operate completely differently with minimal changes. One may gain 11% to 15% raw computational throughput performance, but have no latency guarantees on what the pipeline will do or when. This will often eventually cause intermittent CDC mismatch under load, as the compiler pseudo-randomly decides to do something silly every time something is updated.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_domain_crossing

          The current best solution is to side-load special fpga memory access modules into the multi-tasking kernel space for handling DSP data stream filtering on Zynq.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_impulse_response

          https://www.analog.com/en/resources/evaluation-hardware-and-...

          Best of luck, =3

          • acuozzo a day ago ago

            Is it possible you're confusing LLVM with JIT compilation?

            Clang targeting LLVM, despite the name, produces binaries compiled 100% ahead-of-time.

            The "LLVM" is just the intermediate representation used by the compiler. GCC uses GIMPLE and RTL.

            > In C... it is still possible to bake what is placed in "register" a priori

            By what mechanism? Even ancient GCC circa 1989 ignored the "register" keyword/storage-class. Automatic register allocation algorithms have been the default for a long time. You have to go back to the K&R days to find a compiler willing to honor it (or find an esoteric compiler like AZTEC C for the 6502).

            • Joel_Mckay a day ago ago

              JIT is even worse, as if you have ever built a compiler one already knows about why backpatching is needed during the generator stages. I cringe every time someone brings up embedded python, and lose hope for future coders.

              I agree it is subtle, so takes some people a few hours to understand, and for others never. If you work in Application user-space, than it usually won't matter. Note I like Julia, but it is also not a good fit for SDR or low-latency DSP.

              People seem upset for some reason, but one may want to check out Analog Devices training documentation as a student. =3

              • acuozzo 6 hours ago ago

                I'm not a student. I work with SDRs and in latency-critical problem domains at a telecommunications research laboratory.

                I'm also not upset. I just want to know which compilers you're using which honor the "register" keyword in C.

              • jeezfrk 19 hours ago ago

                Julia is not written in assembly.

          • ronsor 21 hours ago ago

            I think if we're going that deep about latency, you really ought to stay away from traditional x86 (and ARM64!) platforms entirely.

            SMM firmware can interrupt any time for whatever reason, meaning even a plain, unoptimized assembly program can have unpredictable latency.

            • Joel_Mckay 18 hours ago ago

              RTLinux kernel works fine on both platforms, and includes external synchronous scheduling context clock peripheral input on arm64 (the kernel scheduled tasks are synchronized across all RT processors.)

              Indeed, people can write shit code in any language.

              Trying to avoid a problem is fine, but sometimes people still do silly things for irrational reasons. =3

              • Retr0id 11 hours ago ago

                SMM doesn't care what kernel you're running, it will preempt you anyway.

          • jath03 a day ago ago

            Interesting, so some of LLVM's optimization passes change the program in ways that introduce subtle latencies that can matter for DSP applications? Does this apply to clang-compiled C, or only some other languages with llvm back-ends?

            • Joel_Mckay a day ago ago

              All llvm compilers I have seen do this, and it includes one of my favorites Julia as well. =3

          • ErroneousBosh 16 hours ago ago

            Mmm. This sounds like you either know a hell of a lot more about the subject than me, or a hell of a lot less.

            If I point you at an example github repo, can you devise a coherent and repeatable test for this "jitter"?

            Edit:

            > The current best solution is to side-load special fpga memory access modules into the multi-tasking kernel space for handling DSP data stream filtering on Zynq.

            Yeah, no. Also FIR? Really? Unacceptable.

            • Joel_Mckay 8 hours ago ago

              Should still be repeatable with a more modern benchmark suite and RT patch, but depends what your design constraints entail.

              https://people.mpi-sws.org/~bbb/papers/pdf/ospert13.pdf

              Personally, I would try something cheeky like porting classic cycletest to Rust, and run the two stripped versions under identical test loads to see if the skew is noticeable from user-space. Then re-run the test after an identical slight change affecting code motion. That should exclude most confounding variables like modern kernel language dependency injections etc.

              Doesn't sound very fun, but should be relatively trivial to quantify. In my use-case, two concurrent register state change atomic operations order timing proved important. Heisenbugs are hard to replicate, but wishing them away doesn't help. Best of luck =3

      • newspicel a day ago ago

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    • newspicel a day ago ago

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  • bmgxyz a day ago ago

    I wonder how much of the signal graph feature set could be implemented as an SDR++ module. It could even be written in Rust with some FFI.

    Rather than rewrite the entire SDR++ core in a separate project, maybe it would be better to incrementally port the existing code to Rust in a fork. I don't know what attitude the maintainers have toward Rust, though.

  • tamimio a day ago ago

    Looks very similar in look and functionality to sdrangel, how’s it different? I remember running sdrangel in containter on a jetson nano and was eating the resources like crazy, any improvement over that?

  • newspicel a day ago ago

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  • hndhyc0bdt a day ago ago

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  • huflungdung a day ago ago

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