-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 1/17/2013 6:02 PM, Bas Laarhoven wrote: > On 17-1-2013 22:57, Kent A. Reed wrote: >> Finally, with respect to your next email message, how universal >> is your statement that TI "...decided not to support the PRUSS >> anymore." Does this refer to the TI documentation and software >> situation or does it mean TI has decided they can't make money >> developing SoCs with PRUSS and, hence, the current AM335x series >> is the end of the road? I could get depressed:-( > > Disclaimer: First of all, some of my conclusions here may be > wrong, but it's all based on what I saw, heard and discovered > during my experiments with the PRUSS over the last 12 months. I > think the PRUSS is of strategic importance for this SOC family, and > wouldn't expect TI to abandon it. Unless it's causing silicon yield > problems or something like that. The story is that some people at > TI decided they didn't want to spend time supporting the PRUSS to > the open source community. Another part of TI didn't agree and that > resulted in the crippled pru package on github. TI spend a lot of > time (money) rewriting documentation, strip the assembler source of > the new features, change to name from PRUSS into ICCS, etc. etc. > The real reason for this still being unclear. Is the silicon > defective? Are some of the new features not working properly? I did > find some problems with the built-in multipliers. I can imagine > they only want to support a select group op developers who make the > commercial solutions (e.g. Ethercat) for them and probably work > under NDA. But that's all speculation and maybe we'll never know > the real reason(s). In the meantime, the PRUSS subsystem is much > more powerfull than currently documented. If you want to catch a > glimpse you'll have to find you a copy the rev. C TRM. BTW: My fork > of the pru assembler supports a large part of these extensions, in > case you want to experiment with them : )
I agree with Bas on this. I think the PRU is of strategic market importance to TI, for the same reason it works so well for our needs (it's hard to get an ARM running Linux to have respectable real-time performance). It is my opinion that the slight 'chaos' surrounding the PRU documentation and support issues involves both big company issues (ie: the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing) and a fair dose of the real-world fact that it takes time and effort to get documentation (even something that might already exist internal to TI) approved and released to public customers. I do think that TI "gets it" with regards to open-source, but that doesn't mean they're 100% there, or that they can release everything that might exist internally. Note that programming the PRU is generally *NOT* directly supported even for "traditional" customers, the intention is people will use the TI provided libraries to implement tested and approved versions of various real-time protocols. I'm personally glad they've released as much information as they have. If you want to knock TI for what they haven't released, go try and figure out how to boot a Raspberry Pi (which requires the GPU to boot and then kick-start the ARM running Linux). I've worked with several other chips that were not "closed source" and yet they had less documentation for particular features than TI has already released for the PRU. Even under NDA for one of these chips (a video decoder from Analog Devices), it took several months to obtain some 'official' internal documentation for a particular operating mode...by which time I had already reverse engineered everything I needed to know. In short, I don't think TI is being evil, or that they are considering abandoning the PRU...they just have lots of people who are busy doing other things besides writing documentation for the open-source community, and they are big enough anything released to the public at large has to pass various "lawyer tests". - -- Charles Steinkuehler char...@steinkuehler.net -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iEYEARECAAYFAlD4lUUACgkQLywbqEHdNFzRowCgo7dtePFRHgPd+wUgvIjPFEGw j+oAoOVAUg+T1fCfSGwNEctslzunE7Vv =xp7x -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Master HTML5, CSS3, ASP.NET, MVC, AJAX, Knockout.js, Web API and much more. Get web development skills now with LearnDevNow - 350+ hours of step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. SALE $99.99 this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122812 _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list Emc-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
