OSD bugging me....

["Ralph Metzler <" <rjkm@netcologne.de>]

Plamen Ganev writes:
 > I'm currently working on extending the menu handling of VDR, however I see a
 > rather nasty problem with OSD that I think is related to the driver.... I
 > think we all need Ralph's help.
 > 
 > The problem is this: A big OSD windows (as seen in the VDR main menu) seems
 > to cause trouble in the firmware after a series of show/hide operations as
 > when someone is playing with the channels/menues in VDR.

[...]


 > One more thing I did: I tried opening a big OSD window (i.e. almost the size
 > of the entire screen) with freshly loaded drivers... and guess what? I hit
 > the problem immediately and I could not open this window. So... is there a
 > maximum OSD window that can be opened and are big windows causing trouble
 > with memory (i.e. how's memory allocated? malloc in armlib?)...
 > 
 > I see that Ralph has done some fixups in OSD in the firmware between version
 > 0.05 and 0.06 of the driver. Version 0.05 firmware will either hang
 > (outcommand error 1) or have noise on screen (as Klaus, the author of VDR
 > pointed in the past). Version 0.06 of the firmware/driver will not have
 > outcommand errors, but it will not show OSD.


There is very little memory for OSD. 
The older firmware had 32K. In the last firmware I freed up a little
more, about 100K. For those who have the AV7110 specs, I used the
described mechanism which uses some of the DRAM for buffering to free
up SDRAM. I could not go to the maximum limits described there because
then there would be mistakes in the playback.
They should have put 4MB SDRAM on the card instead of 2MB. The AV7110
has nice graphics capabilities if one has the memory for it.

I also added a lot of pointer checking to the OSD code in the
firmware. Thatīs why there are no more ARM crashes (outcommand errors).
Iīll go over it again to check if there is any memory loss. 


 > I can debug more if needed (Ralph? Is it possible to get sources for the
 > firmware so I can help? I did a lot of ARM7 programming in the past for
 > embedded systems, and still have access to VLSI JumpStart and Arm SDK).


Sorry, but we are bound by NDAs not to release the firmware.


Ralph