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trx: Add Hardware device support section 

Change-Id: I87fc54cf1751f31a3e92d6503625e984f9a6130f
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Pau Espin 2018-07-05 18:26:52 +02:00 committed by Neels Hofmeyr
parent 762c951faa
commit d06172ce32
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doc/manuals/chapters/trx-backends.adoc Normal file
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[[osmotrx_device_support]]
== OsmoTRX hardware device support
OsmoTRX consists of a _common_ part that applies to all TRX devices as well as
_hardware-specific_ parts for each TRX device. The hardware-specific parts are
usually provided by vendor-specific or device-specific libraries that are then
handled by some OsmoTRX glue code presenting a unified interface towards the
rest of the code by means of a _RadioDevice_ class.
The common part includes the core TRX architecture as well as code for
implementing the external interfaces such as the TRX Manager UDP socket,
control, and VTY interfaces.
The hardware-specific parts include support for driving one particular
implementation of a radio modem. Such a physical layer
implementation can come in many forms. Sometimes it runs on a general
purpose CPU, sometimes on a dedicated ARM core, a dedicated DSP, a
combination of DSP and FPGA.
Joining the common part with each of the available backends results in a
different binary with different suffix for each backend. For instance, when
OsmoTRX is built with UHD backend, an _osmo-trx-uhd_ binary is generated; when
OsmoTRX is built with LimeSuite backend, an _osmo-trx-lms_ binary is generated.
Build of different backend can be enabled and disabled by means of configure
flags, which can be found in each subsection relative to each backend below.
== `osmo-trx-uhd` for UHD based Transceivers
This OsmoTRX model uses _libuhd_ (UHD, USRP Hardware Driver) to drive the
device, that is configuring it and reading/writing samples from/to it.
So far, this backend has been mostly used to drive devices such as the Ettus
B200 family and Fairwaves UmTRX family, and used to be the default backend used
for legacy @osmo-trx@ binary when per-backend binaries didn't exist yet.
Any device providing generic support for UHD should theoretically be able to be
run through this backend without much effort, but pracitcal experience showed
that some devices don't play well with it, such as the LimeSDR family of
devices, which showed far better results when using its native interface.
Related code can be found in the _Transceiver52M/device/uhd/_ directory in
_osmo-trx.git_.
== `osmo-trx-lms` for LimeSuite based Transceivers
This OsmoTRX model uses LimeSuite API and library to drive the device, that is
configuring it and reading/writing samples from/to it.
This backend was developed in order to be used together with LimeSDR-USB and
LimeSDR-mini devices, due to to the poor results obtained with the UHD backend,
and to simplify the stack.
Related code can be found in the _Transceiver52M/device/lms/_ directory in
_osmo-trx.git_.
== `osmo-trx-usrp1` for libusrp based Transceivers
This OsmoTRX model uses the legacy libusrp driver provided in GNU Radio 3.4.2.
As this code was dropped from GNU Radio at some point and was found very
difficult to build, some work was done to create a standalone libusrp which can
be nowadays found as a separate git repository together with other osmocom git
repositories, in https://git.osmocom.org/libusrp/
Related code can be found in the _Transceiver52M/device/usrp1/_ directory in
_osmo-trx.git_.

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doc/manuals/osmotrx-usermanual.adoc
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@ -25,6 +25,8 @@ include::chapters/configuration.adoc[]
include::chapters/trx-architectures.adoc[]
include::chapters/trx-backends.adoc[]
include::../common/chapters/trx_if.adoc[]
include::../common/chapters/port_numbers.adoc[]