Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 27 Jul 1999 01:32:15 +0000 | From | Steve Underwood <> | Subject | Re: porting linux to DSP |
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"S . Arun" wrote:
> Hello folks! > > I am thinking whether linux can be ported to a DSP chip. I would like to > know if it is possible, given that it doesn't have a cache and not a huge > amount of memory etc. If anybody thinks it is possible, can you please tell > me where to start and how to go about doing it? > > When I say linux, I don't mean linux servers; just the basic kernel with > its networking features. I am toying with this idea because a DSP chip is > considerably cheaper than the present day pentium.
A DSP is very much a number crunching machine. Most are more specifically polynomial crunching machines. They lack almost everything a general purpose OS like Linux needs - a general purpose instruction set, MMU, large memory support, etc.
Take an application like a modem. The DSP can do all the heavy calculations for the signal processing part well. Now you need a little management and V42 error correction and data compression. Try doing that part on a DSP and the code gets large, slow and _very_ ugly.
Real time OSes do exist for some DSPs (e.g. SPOX), but they are _very_ much specialist DSP OSes, and they ain't too pretty.
Steve
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