My GPU received new drivers from Windows Update. However last version of driver provided by Ati/AMD (not sure) available from the site is more than a year old. I do not know what happened. Microsoft wrote new drivers on his own? Microsoft forced AMD to that?
The questions are: Is it possible that someone has written his own GPU drivers which works on specific OS far better than drivers provided by the manufacturer? Would not it require technical documentation of the GPU (which probably is kept safe by the manufacturer)?
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My particular hardware target is a MinnoboardMax Turbot Dual-E, but I believe this question is generic to Intel Atom/BayTrail processors on other boards.
The SoC has a "multifunction serial port" (SSP) that can be used as a SPI bus interface. It can be attached by ACPI or by PCI (in the later case, the PCI id is 0x8086:0x0f0e). And within the Linux kernel, there is existing driver support (low_speed_spidev, spi_pxa2xx_pci, spi_pxa2xx_platform) which allows access to the hardware.
I would like to access the hardware from UEFI, and I'm finding very little documentation on how to access or program this hardware. I don't care very much whether I have to set it into ACPI or PCI mode in the BIOS, either one is OK for my purposes. I'd love to find an existing driver, but after half a day of searching I'm pretty convinced it's not out there. (Happy to be proven wrong on that.)
In lieu of that, can anyone point me to any code examples that would help to bootstrap this? I've tried looking at the Linux and BSD source code, but they both involve so many extra layers for generality/portability that I'm having trouble sorting out the portions that relate to this particular device, and the portions that simply support a generic driver model.
Edit: Post originally mistakenly said AHCI.
I've tried to understand the difference between the two ROS Universal Robot drivers and decide which one to use. So far, I'm mainly confused. As I am new to ROS and robot control I'd appreciate any explanation and hints where to start looking for more details.
From what I've seen, there are two Universal Robot ROS drivers available
(1) https://github.com/ros-industrial/universal_robot
(2) https://github.com/UniversalRobots/Universal_Robots_ROS_Driver
with (1) being "supplemented" by (3) https://github.com/fmauch/universal_robot/tree/calibration_devel.
(1) wasn't updated in while whereas (2) seems to get regular updates. Yet (3) seems to suggest that (1) is still being worked on (see https://github.com/ros-industrial/universal_robot/issues/573 as well). Which one is the "active" one? Which one should be used for which use case?
It also seems to me that I can't use (2) with gazebo. However, as I said, I'm new to ROS and might be misunderstanding something entirely. What I'd like to be able to do is simulate an UR10e to develop my application within gazebo and then swap to the real robot as transparently as possible.
Thanks to all the maintainers of the UR ROS drivers (from both/all repos :))!
The ROS-Industrial set of drivers was the original community driven drivers, started back in 2012. While sparsely updated compared to back then, since it has the force & name of ROS Industrial, the community is still actively submitting issues, PR, and they are (slowly) getting merged in, as needed.
The Universal Robotics drivers were started back in 2016, as the company's official ROS support, with support from ROS Industrial for the "modernization" of the drivers. It's seeing a ton of active development & upkeep, as there are dedicated people to maintaining just this repo & drivers.
They are both active, and functionally, they likely both work for what you're trying to do (since what you want seems simple or solved). Once the driver is written, if the device doesn't change, the driver doesn't need to. For example, the older ROS Industrial has a bunch of documentation (possibly old but still good) on using the drivers with Gazebo, and drivers for UR 10e (a very common device), so that would be sufficient for your needs. If you get done what you need to get done, that's fine.
As for the UR official drivers, they are (with ROS Industrial group's support) the "new" and "modern" drivers, to extend the functionality from the older drivers; I suppose I should be recommending you to use these, but they are still work-in-progress. If there are features/limitations in the old drivers that you need, they should be fixed in the modern drivers. To not date this reply too much, the exact coverage is constantly increasing, and the support should be quicker than the old drivers. Eventually, full functionality and more will be done through this "modern" branch; for example, ROS2 support will/should not be added to the older ROS Industrial drivers.
I'm moving from windows programming (By windows programming I mean using Windows API) to Linux Programming.
For programming Windows, the option we have is Win32API (MFC is just a C++ wrapper for the same).
I want to know if there is something like Linux API (equivalent to WINAPI) that is exposed directly to the programmer? Where can I find the reference?
With my little knowledge of POSIX library I see that it wraps around part of Linux API. But what about creating GUI applications? POSIX doesn't offer that. I know there are tons of 3rd party Widget toolkits like gtk, Qt etc. But I don't want to use the libraries that encapsulates Linux API. I want to learn using the "Core Linux API".
If there are somethings that I should know, please inform. Any programmer who is familiar with both Windows & Linux programming, please map the terminologies of Linux world so that I can quickly move on.
Any resources (books,tutorials,references) are highly appreciated.
I think you're looking for something that doesn't exactly exist. Unlike the Win32 API, there is no "Linux API" for doing GUI applications. The closest you can get is the X protocol itself, which is a pretty low level way of doing GUI (it's much more detailed and archaic than Win32 GDI, for example). This is why there exist wrappers such as GTK and Qt that hide the details of the X protocol.
The X protocol is available to C programs using XLib.
What you must understand is that Linux is very bare as to what is contained within it. The "Core" Linux API is POSIX and glibc. Linux is NOT graphical by default, so there is no core graphics library. Really, Windows could be stripped down to not have graphics also and thus not have parts of the win32 API like GDI. This you must understand. Linux is very lightweight compared to Windows.
For Linux there are two main graphical toolkits, GTK and Qt. I myself prefer GTK, but I'd research both. Also note that GTK and Qt exist for Windows to, because they are just wrappers. If you go take a look at the X protocol code for say xterm, you'll see why no one tries to actually creating graphical applications on top of it.
Oh, also SDL is pretty nice, it is pretty bare, but it is nice if your just needing a framebuffer for a window. It is portable between Linux and Windows and very easy to learn. But it will only stretch so far..
Linux and win aren't quite as different as it looks.
On both systems there exists a kernel that is not graphical.
It's just that Microsoft doesn't document this kernel and publishes an API that references various different components.
On Unix, it's more transparent. There really is a (non-GUI) kernel API and it is published. Then, there are services that run on top of this, optionally, and their interfaces are published without an attempt to merge them into an imaginary layer that doesn't really exist.
So, the lowest GUI level is a the X Window System and it has a lowest level library called Xlib. There are various libraries that run on top of this one, as you have noted.
I would highly recommended looking at the QT/C++ UI framework, it's arguably the most comprehensive UI toolkit for any platform.
We're using it at work developing cross platform apps that run on windows, osx and linux.
It also runs on Nokia's smart phone Operating System Maemo which has recently been merged with Intel's Moblin Linux OS, now called MeeGo.
This is going to sound insane since you're asking about "serious" stuff like C++ and C (and the "core linux API"), but you might want to consider building in something else. For instance:
Java Swing (many people love it! Others hate it and call it obsolete)
Mono GTK# (C# or VisualBasic or whatever you want, lots of people say it's pretty cool, but they're not not that many people)
Adobe AIR (ActionScript, you might hate it)
Titanium (totally new and unproven, but getting a lot of buzz in the iPhone world, at least)
And many other possibilities, some of which let you work on multiple platforms at once.
Sorry if this answer is not at all what you're looking for. The "real" answers on Linux are "pick a toolkit," which is also no answer at all :)
Have a look at Cairo. This something roughly similar to GDI+ and is under the hood of some of of the few usable GUI programs for Linux i.e. Firefox or Eclipse (SWT). It wraps most the natsy and ancient Linux stuff for you into a nice API that runs on most Linux installations without locking you into a entire subsystems like GTK or QT.
There is also the docs for the two different desktop platforms: Gnome and KDE that might help you down that road.
I have used dxdiag before, but I would prefer to point potential users to some tool that's a bit simpler, that they can just run and email me the output.
As well as obvious things like CPU, RAM, graphics, DirectX version and Windows version, I also need to know if ExpressCard (a laptop standard) is supported.
I know this isn't quite a programming question, but it's critical to establishing a way to tell users if their hardware supports our software before we deploy it.
System Information tool (msinfo32). Comes standard with the OS; supports bunch of command-line switches as well, allowing you to automate it.
In particular, you can tell the users to just run the following command and email you the resulting .txt file:
msinfo32 /report "%USERPROFILE%\desktop\configuration.txt"
Or if you want a subset, just filter it out based on the categories.
Not sure where is the info about the ExpressCard in it, but it should be in there somewhere.
All this information will be available through the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI).
There are some microsoft provided examples available here.
I completely newbie in device drivers, so I hope my question is in place, but I need to develop a driver to control some equipment. I was thinking on using Linux as the host OS, but not sure if it is such good idea. I've heard some horror stories about the mess of developing device drivers under Linux. Is there a better alternative under the *Nix world? Or maybe should I check other OSes?
Linux documentation is basically non-existent (similar to other platforms). However, there are a few books which do cover enough information to get started, and the trickier kernel bits can borrowed from other drivers (yay for Open Source).
However, it is one of the easiest current platforms to develop drivers for. There are cleaner models, such as QNX, but that product is sadly near the end (and doesn't support 1/10th as much as hardware as Linux)
What type of device is the driver targetting? Many times you can avoid writing in-kernel drivers (for instance, using libusb in userspace, or the user space IO framework)