HackRF Shell Project

So, I got really far in the hackrf-stream project, with essentially everything working to control the HackRF and to manage the RX streams, and then ran into a fatal snag. Everything was based on the idea that I could use FIFO OS pipes to move the data from the C program to the processing program, but FIFO OS pipes turned out to be not fast enough for my needs. In the end, I was only able to move about 90% of the data live across the pipe, and profiling indicated the bottleneck was in system calls, rather than in number crunching. 90% is a lot of data, but I needed 100% going across.

So, I was faced with multiple options on how to proceed. On approach would be to switch instead to Shared Memory Objects for IPC. That I believe would have removed the i/o performance problem, but then all the control applications would need POSIX Shared Memory support, which rather went against the whole idea of having a simple, language agnostic interface.

Another idea was to abandon the idea of a simple, language agnostic interface, and just use POSIX Shared Memory Objects anyway. Unfortunately, Racket Scheme does not have a shared memory interface. Instead, it uses something called “places”, which is shared memory, but only allows sharing with other Racket programs. Chicken Scheme does have a POSIX shm interface, but I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to start using Chicken Scheme just for that reason.

Where I landed in the end was a different approach: embedding Guile Scheme inside my C program. This means when I start the C program, I’m dropped into a Guile Scheme shell, from which I can call whatever C functions I want (after writing the appropriate stubs). This takes me full circle back to what I originally had wanted to do with this project, but instead of using a Racket FFI, I am actually embedding Guile scheme inside the C application, with the C application providing all the core control and performance functionality. If it works, this should be the most fun approach.

I have renamed the project the “HackRF Shell” project.

git clone git://git.librehacker.com/pub/git/hackrf-rkt.git