Category: Sigma Designs EM862X

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments on NTFS for Embedded Linux Systems

NTFS for Embedded Linux Systems

NTFS benchmarchs for embedded systems Tuxera vs NTFS-3G vs ext-3

Since now more and more HD videos are larger than 4GB they can not be stored into FAT32 file system, and require the use of other file systems, the most popular being ext2/ext3 or NTFS. However, since many users may want to access the mass storage devices (IDE / SATA harddisk, USB Harddisk, USB Thumbdrives…) in Windows as well as in their embedded systems (IP STV, Digital Signage..) NTFS seems to the best choice to share data between Windows systems and embedded systems using Linux. NTFS is available in the Linux kernel. However only read-only is fully supported and the performance is about 25% less than ext-2 or ext-3 for the platforms we tested (EM8623L and SMP8635), but this is still acceptable to play most of HD Videos. However, if the device also needs to download videos from a server or other P2P clients, having a read-only file system will […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment on Sigma Designs EM862X Resources

Sigma Designs EM862X Resources

We are using EM8623 for the development of set-top-box and digital signage applications. In order to develop for that platform, an SDK must be purchased directly from Sigma Designs. However, the linux kernel is open source so companies need to release the source if they modified it in their products. For example, you could download the GPL source released by Kiss Technology – http://www.kiss-technology.com/files/firmware/GPL.zip. This is only the GPL source for your reference, after that there are also sigma linux drivers (not released by sigma) and not GPL, and the MRUA package that needs to be purchased from Sigma Designs. One the challenge of using EM862X platforms (EM8620L, EM8621L, EM8622L, EM8623L etc..) is that it has no MMU (Memory Management Unit) and that may make the software debugging very interesting.. You may experience spectacular crashes, kernel panic without any apparent reason. But most of the time this is due to […]