by Mikhail Karpenko
Introduction
Elphel cameras use camogm, a user space application, for recording acquired images to a disk storage. The application is developed to use such storage devices as disk drives or USB drives mounted in the operating system. The Elphel393 model cameras have SATA-2 controller implemented in FPGA, a system driver for this controller, and they can be equipped with an SSD drive. We were interested in performing write speed tests using the SATA controller and a couple of M.2 SSDs to find out the top disk bandwidth camogm can use during image recording. Our initial approach was to try a commonly accepted method of using hdparm and dd system utilities. The first disk was SanDisk SD8SMAT128G1122. According to the manufacturer specification [pdf], this is a low power disk for embedded applications and this disk can show 182 MB/s sequential write speed in SATA-3 mode. We had the following:
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~# hdparm -t /dev/sda2 /dev/sda2: Timing buffered disk reads: 274 MB in 3.02 seconds = 90.70 MB/sec ~# time sh -c "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda2 bs=500M count=1 && sync" 1+0 records in 1+0 records out real 0m6.096s user 0m0.000s sys 0m5.860s |
which results in total write speed around 82 MB/s.
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by Mikhail Karpenko
AHCI PLATFORM DRIVER
In kernels prior to 2.6.x AHCI was only supported through PCI and hence required custom patches to support platform AHCI implementation. All modern kernels have SATA support as part of AHCI framework which significantly simplifies driver development. Platform drivers follow the standard driver model convention which is described in Documentation/driver-model/platform.txt in kernel source tree and provide methods called during discovery or enumeration in their platform_driver structure. This structure is used to register platform driver and is passed to module_platform_driver() helper macro which replaces module_init() and module_exit() functions. We redefined probe() and remove() methods of platform_driver in our driver to initialize/deinitialize resources defined in device tree and allocate/deallocate memory for driver specific structure. We also opted to resource-managed function devm_kzalloc() as it seems to be preferred way of resource allocation in modern drivers. The memory allocated with resource-managed function is associated with the device and will be freed automatically after driver is unloaded.
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by Mikhail Karpenko
Introduction
Teardrops in KiCAD
We, at Elphel, are currently using proprietary software for schematic and PCB development and thus are not able to provide our customers with the “real” source files of our designs – pdf and gerber files only. Being free software and open hardware oriented company we would like to replace this software with open source analogues but were not able to accomplish this due to various limitations and inconveniences in design work-flow. We follow the progress in such projects as gEDA and KiCAD and made another attempt to use one them in our work. KiCAD seems to be the most promising design suite considering recent CERN contribution and active community support. I tried to design a simple element, a flexible printed circuit cable, using KiCAD and found out that the PCB design program lacks such useful feature as teardrops.
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