WorkInProgressV3 7 5

Work in progress for release 3.7.5

This is a list of some of the planned new feature sets for release 3.7.5. This is not comprehensive; other features or changes could happen opportunistically and some of the below might not make the release.

By component

gr-zeromq

• Extend gr-zeromq blocks to include async message transports in and out of ZeroMQ sockets (JC)
• Tunnel stream tags through ZeroMQ streaming blocks (JC)

gr-qtgui

• Close the gap between QT and WX blocks
  • Mostly done
• Convert all examples to use QT instead of WX
  • Also mostly done
• Persistence of plotters
  • Debatable if this is really necessary or useful for these plotters, especially since the plots don't actually plot every sample.
    • Rely on things like gr-fosphor for purposes that need behavior like persistence
• Sidebar control
  • Provide an (optional) sidebar to control the main plotting features
• Strip chart for time plot for updating when plotting slow data

grc

• Add <hide> tags to ports in the xml file for a block
  • Use to control which and when blocks' ports are seen on the canvas
  • We can set them off by default and use a setting in the block properties to turn them on/off

• User-toggled parameter to show or hide the names of ports
  • Ports appear as small rectangles of their type color, but with no label
  • when mousing over a port, the port expands to show the full name
  • connecting arrows are adjusted with the width of the box nicely
  • User-controlled feature; "View->Auto-hide Port Lable" to turn feature on/off

New Component(s)

gr-dtv

• Create new top-level component gr-dtv (JC)
• Port gr-atsc code over into lib/atsc (JC)
• Merge Bogdan Diaconescu's gr-dvbt into lib/dvbt (JC)
• Merge (undecided) DVB-S code into lib/dvbs (JC)
• Merge (undecided) CATV code into lib/catv (JC)
• Extract common MPEG code into lib/mpeg (JC)
• Implement common, format-selectable transceiver application (JC)

General Improvements

Message Passing

• Messaging as many things as possible for control
  • 3.7.4 saw some additions of various message interfaces for a few blocks, and we had to work out proper interactions between them all. We should add more message port controls to blocks that we can identify as having a big impact on usage and come to a general understanding of message formats for certain controls to make sure they are generic and usable for many blocks, not just between two specifically designed to talk to each other.

• Think about how to add back-pressure on messages

Optimizations

• Add more VOLK kernels
• Use VOLK kernels in more blocks
• Add better NEON support
  • More hand-written NEON proto-kernels
  • NEON intrinsics are not necessarily great, need to use assembly to properly optimize
    • NEON inline ASM in C is terrible; need to have separate .s files
    • We want to add support in the build system to have NEON asm files built into VOLK and used in proto-kernels

• Add a new build type to help us understand compiler optimization and assembly code
  • Add a "NoOptWithASM" build type that uses the flags "-O0 -g -save-temps"
  • for GCC and Clang, this produces code with debug symbols, no compiler optimization, and all assembly files saved in the build dir
  • Need a good location in our cmake structure to add new build types

• Add Nathan's performance counter work from last hackfest
  • Adds perf tool calls to Performance Counters such as cache hits/misses, branch prediction misses
  • Adds ability to select which PC to show in gr-perf-monitorx and tooltip for all PCs when hovering over a block