GRCon14VOLK

= GRCon14VOLK =

The VOLK working group will meet on Thursday 9/18 at 2:30 (For conference schedule see http://www.trondeau.com/grcon14-agenda/). The schedule gives us approximately 2 hours dedicated to VOLK discussion. The current agenda includes:


 * Review of progress
 * Packaging discussion


 * Breaking VOLK out of GNU Radio (pro/con discussion)


 * Versioning


 * Other issues brought up by packagers


 * VOLK maintenance


 * Deprecating protokernels


 * ISA specific discussions (NEON, AVX{2}, orc)


 * Programming and compiler techniques


 * preloading


 * efficient use of pipeline

Maintenance and Packaging
Break out in 3.8 (aim to). Look in to git solutions for a subproject (git subtree or submodule). The deprecation (and API breakage) policy is protokernels will be removed from the tree and announced in release notes only.

Programming and Compiler Techniques
armv6 compilation is broken. Have a failure case where a native build requires a flag to pass in architecture. There's a bug that NEON is detected in armv6 that needs to be fixed.

AVX2 and eventually armv8 will require us to look at CPU vendor. Look at arch.xml and potentially rearchitecting for that.

volk_modtool
New options requested:


 * Add new kernel
 * Force a line in test/QA code at cmake time.

Misc features
Add table of coverage of kernels and architectures. Check in to the documentation for kernels. It should be clear what the purpose of every kernel is to someone who might find a use for it (looking at you, sum_of_poly!)