Bristol Digest, Vol 558, Issue 5

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Today's Topics:

1. Re: 2 TV cards - can they work together!? (David Smith)


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Message: 1
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2014 09:54:23 +0000
From: David Smith <David.Smith@imgtec.com>
To: Bristol and Bath Linux User Group <bristol@mailman.lug.org.uk>
Subject: Re: [bristol] 2 TV cards - can they work together!?
Message-ID:
<15A9D35B5490FC49AC0524AE3A085F086A0752@BRMAIL01.br.imgtec.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

> -----Original Message-----
> From: bristol-bounces@mailman.lug.org.uk [mailto:bristol-
> bounces@mailman.lug.org.uk] On Behalf Of Alex Butcher
> Already most capably explained by David, but to emphasise 'module' is not
> the same thing as 'firmware'. A kernel module is part of the OS kernel (i.e.
> Linux proper) and runs on your system's main CPU (i.e. the Intel or AMD
> x86), firmware runs on embedded processor(s) (probably an ARM core of
> some description, these days, but could be something proprietary - a la
> nVidia or ATI's GPUs - or even a Z80 on a hard drive's integrated
> electronics) on the peripheral itself.

Or in the case of a TV card, probably a DSP.

It's even possible to download the "design" of the logic on the card - I made a card containing an FPGA (basically a sea of logic gates that can be connected together by giving it a configuration file) where I downloaded the FPGA's configuration as a "firmware" binary dump on boot. The logic gates to interface the configuration pins to the ISA bus (that's how old it was) were cheaper than an EPROM for storing the configuration.



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End of Bristol Digest, Vol 558, Issue 5
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