There were a bunch of short-term action items agreed at the Feb 2nd meeting (numbered in description below). The next meeting is Tuesday Feb 14th at 11AM. Krste will be dialing in (but it would be very helpful for me if we could set up a toll-free number for the teleconference).
There might not be much this time, but everyone should email in status reports every Monday evening before the meetings. I'll remind people, but please don't wait till Tuesday morning to mail these.
Applications
Jae Lee is going to put H.264 into the XBS framework. This means extracting clean reference code and building input generators and output checkers. We talked about looking at ffmpeg code. The other system I mentioned was Handbrake (http://handbrake.m0k.org/).
- Steve Gerding is going to put 802.11a into XBS. He's already done transmit, and receive should follow shortly.
There are already a bunch of codes in XBS to play with. In particular, JPEG compression could be interesting for a camera-phone use-case or for motion JPEG, and as a basis for an MPEG codec.
Target Simulators
Ken Barr is going to look at what ARM simulators are available and report back. NrcArch/ArmSimulators
- Daniel Finchelstein is going to find out what TI C55 DSP simulators are available.
Compiler tool chain
- John Ankcorn is going to look at how to bring up ARM C/C+ compiler, assembler, linker as cross-compilers on Linux boxes.
- John: Some documentation on executable format (ABI) might be needed to build proxy kernel and server for simulator.
- Daniel/John: look at C55 tools too?
With all of these surveys of existing code, we need to be careful to determine the licencing situation for both source and binaries. We should consider situation for each of MIT, Nokia, and general public. We would like as much as possible to be open source, and everything we develop on the MIT side will be under an MIT/BSD-style licence. Looking ahead, we should make sure our development environment supports building distributions with a subset of the components.
We agreed on an initial system to model, as a UTL netlist:
- unit server(srvr_to_arm, arm_to_srvr); // Loads binaries, handles I/O.
- unit arm(srvr_to_arm, arm_to_srvr, arm_to_mem, mem_to_arm); // ARM core.
- unit mem(arm_to_mem, mem_to_arm); // Magic memory.
Our first milestone will be getting compiled reference code of an XBS application running on this system under simulation.
Some upcoming tasks:
- We need to build a website of some form.
- We'll have to agree on some top-level directory structure for the cvs to be hosted on cagfarm.
Krste