Graphics (SDL, DirectFB & Qt) and Video on Blackfin Linux

This is a short demo of some graphics applications (SDL, DirectFB, and Qt) running on the Analog Devices BF548 Blackfin Processor under Linux. Find more information at http://blackfin.uclinux.org

• Category

  Science & Technology

[donnyab]

thinking of getting a blackfin board, notice visualdsp++ only comes with a 90 day licence, will I be able to use the board and program it using only GCC tools/u-boot/ucLinux ?

[rlgetz]

The GNU tools support all Blackfin parts, except the BF535. Linux runs on everything with an external memory bus. You can find tools / source / docs on blackfin . uclinux . org / gf /

[anand PV]

Great work

SIMD and ARM both are good for embedded linux (but ARM just amazing) .

[rlgetz]

Blackfin is it's own architecture, and has nothing to do with ARM.

See en.wikipedia . org / wiki / Blackfin

[rlgetz]

If you mean "Linux" as "it", and "Nintendo 64" as n64, I'm not sure - check with google, This is about running Linux on the Blackfin processor. The n64 uses a MIPS processor.

[buddyfreakinhoIIy]

Very impressive.

[Ryan Konky]

WOW! I'm impressed, Linux is a lot better than I thought, I have Ubuntu, but wow!

[rlgetz]

Yes - any Blackfin that supports Linux and a display/audio can run the same demos. The only reason I used the BF548 was since it's development board comes with USB (for keyboard/mouse), hard drive (to put all the media files and demos), LCD (WQVGA 480x272), and audio.

The only question would be performance. Although the cores run all at the same speed, the external memory interfaces are different (BF548 == DDR; BF527 == SDRAM). How much of a difference that makes depends on the application.

[rlgetz]

The BF548 does not have a GPU, so we have not tried OpenGL-ES yet. The video is a standard linux frame buffer managed 100% by the CPU with some simple acceleration for bitblit, line drawing, and rectangle fills using DMA using Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL), DirectFB and Qt (from Nokia/Trolltech).

[wesleyprofox]

Pretty cool stuff :) Does that thing support OpenGL ES or something similar?