Since no one else has responded...
Lorenzo Lutti wrote:
Hi, I've been away from DaVinci development for a while (almost two
years, time flies!) and I need a little catch-up on current status. I
have two questions about DM355:
-Licensing prices. TI site isn't much clear about this; apparently
it's enough to buy the DVEVM (495$) and register it for free in order
to gain access to the production MPEG4 CODEC. Is it really so or is
there some catch (for example the CODECs cannot be interfaced with
open source code and/or used without CCS, and therefore there are
hidden prices to pay)?
The JPEG and MPEG4 codec's are free from Ti. They are built into the
hardware and is not software loadable code for a DSP. Although I believe
there are royalties that you have to pay the MPEG4 consortium if you
ship more than some number (which I don't know) of units. You do have to
pay a ransom to MontaVista for the rights to sell their kernel - this I
believe is around $6K. I never really understood how this worked since
so much of the software was GPL'd.
-Open source Linux status. When I left the development on the DM6446
DVEVM, the status between open source Linux Vs. Montavista Linux was
somewhat difficult to evaluate. The MV version had some improvements
and additional features, but it was based on a older kernel version
and still lacked several fundamental features for production products
(e.g. low power modes support, SPI driver, boot from MMC/SD, VPFE/VPBE
complete support, decent performances for MMC, etc). This isn't a
complaint, obviously the usual Linux philosophy still applies (if you
need it, write it yourself), but it's important to know what you
really have and what you still need to do in order to get an actual
commercial product.
SPI support is sparse. The kernel is 2.6.10 based with a zillion
patches. No cohesive low power scheme. MMC can be booted off of the
kernel if you don't need SDHC. If you want that they can be added (and
original Ti MMC drivers removed) as loadable modules - but then you
can't boot from SDHC. The VPFE/VPBE support is passable, but needs
work. Yaffs2 for NAND does not include checkpointing, so expect long
boot times with a larger filesystems.
Basically the questions can be collapsed into a simpler one: what do I
get by just spending the 495$ for the DVEVM? Do I get enough software
code/tools to develop an actual product, or other commercial tools are
practlcally required?
Thank you!
You get most of what you need. After working on this platform for a
year now I'm fairly happy with what was supplied (cross-compiler, sample
source code, docs etc.) but Ti purposely hides the details of what is
behind their codec api's. This to me is a problem since I've run into
issues with the codecs where it would be nice to trace the code to see
what it was doing...
When you purchase a production license from MV you also get "DevRocket".
Which is a fancy name for a few eclipse plugins. I am not a fan of
eclipse and I've found the supplied implementation buggy and a pain in
the butt to use. Emacs works much better as a development environment.
There is one feature that has helped, and that is the platform builder,
it's fairly easy to create custom filesystem images, even though it just
loves to crash if you push the buttons in the wrong order...
Any other questions, feel free to ask.
Steve
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