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I just wonder if anyone has managed to get the RasPi running GR and OpenBTS without choking?

The RP does not have a strong Floating points support and the amount of memory available to the application after the OS is installed is pretty limited, so I wonder if it is even possible to do so before spending time trying to do it myself.

Really appreciate your help

Thanks in advance, Farhad

FarhadA
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2 Answers2

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The RP does not have a strong Floating points support

It has single precision hardware acceleration, if you use a distro compiled for it, which there are more than a few now. Looking at this, I don't see any reason why the pi should not handle openBTS ("...basically, any computer should do the work. The only thing which is really required is a USB port..."); the guy is using a single core 2.4 Ghz machine with 1 Gb ram, which is considerably faster than the pi, but nothing special.

the amount of memory available to the application after the OS is installed is pretty limited

This is a serious misconception about how operating systems work. Sans GUI, linux needs very very little memory. Here's my raspbian pi right now:

> free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:      ->448708<-   429392      19316          0      20012     383824
-/+ buffers/cache:    ->25556<- ->423152<-
Swap:       102396          0     102396

Those are kB. I've indicated the important numbers. Total 448708 - 423152 free = 25556 used. 25 MB out of 448; this is with the (currently untouched) swap configured as a compressed ram disk, if you change that there should be 512. It's mostly idle right now but it does have a few things running and loaded (eg, ssh and a network sound server).

Obviously, you will hit some kind of limit WRT to the number of calls it can handle, but of course that is true for all machines.

Compiling openBTS may take a while, but all its dependencies should be available as binaries.

goldilocks
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although it is just about possible to use OpenBTS with a Raspberry Pi version 1, the software required some careful fine tuning and, given the compute intensive nature of such software-defined radio (SDR) applications, it is far from practical. using Pi 2, with not only 4x ARM cores but NEON SIMD extensions — which come in very handy for digital signal processing applications — is a much better fit. be aware that there legalities involved. serious restriction applies on most countries

user53753
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