Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Performance Issues

[CEL]

Hi Ralph,

that is actually pretty great news to me! This sounds like we should
maybe be pushing for VMWare appliance images for things like workshops.
Thanks!

Marcus

On Wed, 2018-02-21 at 10:51 +0100, Ralph A. Schmid, dk5ras wrote:
> About the discussion pro and con VM, my experiences with VMware are
> quite good. I am using gnuradio on a Micosoft Surface pro 3, Win 10,
> i7-CPU, 8GB RAM, using Kubuntu 16.04 in the VM. Gnuradio and uhd are
> always built from sources, from master branches. When Windows has no
> other open application running and the focus stays on the VM, it runs
> quite smooth, and openLTE with 5 MHz bandwidth works so far good,
> also transmitting DVB-T with gnuradio is possible. The used radio is
> an Ettus B210, connected with USB3.
> 
> The main reason for my choice is mobility, need this stuff being
> available when traveling :) Dual boot on the surface was at least a
> few years ago a PITA, and MS tended to kill the bootloader with
> updates. Don't know it this is better nowadays.
> 
> Ralph, dk5ras. 
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Discuss-gnuradio [mailto:discuss-gnuradio-
> > address@hidden On Behalf Of Müller, Marcus (CEL)
> > Sent: Tuesday, February 20, 2018 3:36 PM
> > To: address@hidden; address@hidden
> > Subject: Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Performance Issues
> > 
> > Hello Tellrell,
> > 
> > first observation: Step away from Ubuntu 14.04, if possible. Its
> > compilers aren't
> > really as cool as they could be (there's been a lot of performance
> > improvement
> > in both GCC and Clang in the last four years), and you do care
> > about
> > performance.
> > Also, Ubuntu 14.04 won't be around for much longer, so if this is a
> > new
> > application, switching to the next LTS is probably a good idea (by
> > the way, I've
> > not been able to find significant performance regressions in
> > simulation-only
> > GNU Radio flow graphs due to KPTI fixes, i.e. meltdown fixes).
> > 
> > Then: Virtualizers are getting better every day; whether that makes
> > them the
> > best choice for SDR is something that I can't generally answer.
> > Fact is that USB3
> > handthrough to VMs is known to be rather flaky, so if you're using
> > a USRP B2xx,
> > then native is most likely the way to go.
> > If you're using a high-end network card, and a good hypervisor,
> > chances are
> > you can actually have a virtualized dedicated network card in the
> > VM (if that is
> > the case, you probably know yourself, because you'd have configured
> > your VM
> > to be "owner" of part of your network card).
> > 
> > What you should most definitely not do is have a "NAT" networking
> > solution
> > between your VM and your Host – that way, every UDP packet for a
> > network-
> > attached USRP would have to go through a packet analyzer/rewriter,
> > and that's
> > going to eat CPU.
> > 
> > I don't know what your CustomBlock does, but if it not a
> > hier_blopck, Python is
> > really not the thing you want for highest performance. Also, to
> > avoid the
> > vec2stream, make your block consume vectors instead of single
> > samples; the
> > complex_to_magnitude_squared block can be configured to directly
> > work on
> > vectors, too!
> > 
> > Generally, you'll find that most guys on here are happy running a
> > modern Linux
> > on their machines. Setting up a Fedora 27 that boots alternatively
> > to the pre-
> > installed windows took about 15 minutes on my new laptop, but it's
> > definitely
> > not the first installation of that I did, so calculate let's say 30
> > minutes. That's
> > actually something that you might just want to try out. After that,
> > it was really
> > just a matter of "sudo dnf update -y; dnf install -y gnuradio" to
> > be up and
> > running a halfway recent GNU Radio. On debian unstable or testing,
> > you'd get
> > something even more recent.
> > 
> > Best regards,
> > Marcus
> > 
> > On Tue, 2018-02-20 at 08:48 -0500, Tellrell White wrote:
> > > Hello Guys
> > > Currently I'm running a flow graph that looks like the following:
> > > 
> > > UHD Source -> Stream2Vec -> FFT -> Vec2Stream -> Com2Mag^2 ->
> > > CustomBlock(Python)
> > > 
> > > I'm running this block inside of a virtual machine running ubuntu
> > > 14.04 LTS.
> > 
> > The host machine runs Windows with an Intel Core i7-4700 MQ
> > processor
> > running at 2.4GHZ with 8GB of RAM.
> > > 
> > > Running the flow graph shown above in the VM is a struggle
> > > resulting in
> > 
> > freezing after a few seconds so my question is would it better to
> > go another
> > route for performance, either, by installing UHD and Gnu Radio on
> > the host
> > machine running windows or using another machine and dual booting
> > and
> > installing linux, GNU Radio, and UHD for this application?
> > > 
> > > Regards
> > > Tellrell White
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Discuss-gnuradio mailing list
> > > address@hidden
> > > https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnuradio
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss-gnuradio mailing list
> address@hidden
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