Package: wnpp Severity: wishlist Owner: "A. Maitland Bottoms" <bott...@debian.org>
* Package name : uhd-host Version : 3.2.4 Upstream Author : Ettus Research LLC * URL : http://code.ettus.com/redmine/ettus/projects/uhd/wiki * License : GPLv3 Programming Lang: C, Python Description : UHD - Universal Hardware Driver for Universal Software Radio Peripherals For those who remember the usrper application and libusrp* packages, those days are behind us. The UHD library handles both the USB attached USRP1 and ethernet connected USRP2 devices, and newer devices. It replaces the old libusrp1* and libusrp2* stuff. The good news is that the new firmware for the network attached devices actually does UDP/IP - rather than the raw ethernet protocol used by the libusrp2* drivers. Part of what makes that possible is that the FPGA uses a DFSG free BSD style license for an embedded ZPU processor. So here we have free software drivers communicating via TCP/UDP to free hardware which is running embedded free software compiled by a free modification to the free GNU Compiler Collection. The bad news is that the older USB connected boards made use of FX2 USB hardware, and programming of that hardware requires the non-free part of the sdcc compiler. In addition, actually instantiating a free ZPU processor on a FPGA requires proprietary tools from the FPGA manufacturer. Even the USRP1 source is closely tied to the proprietary Altera tools. So the end result is that the generated firmware, even though it comes from freely available and even DFSG free source code, ends up being in Debian's contrib repository instead of main. The ugly news is that firmware developer's "preferred form of the work for making modifications to it" often includes proprietary vendor-specific sections. Only natural, considering that the resulting firmware will be used by that vendor's hardware. So here we have a source package that defines a device/driver interface that is, on the whole, free software. However, parts of the source are constrained by the available proprietary vendor tools. So while modification is allowed to support similar hardware with other vendors, some portions of the source code are not useful for that task. The UHD packages cover the same issues as the previous GNU Radio packages. Perhaps one reason for the similarity is that so many of the same people are involved in the development of both packages. The Road ahead might include UHD driver support for openHPSDR project hardware. This would be a milestone, and would demonstrate the convergence of the GNU project GPL licensed gnuradio software and the TAPR OHL (Open Hardware License) hardware pioneered by TAPR and the openHPSDR project. -Maitland -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
