UHD, the "Universal Software Radio Peripheral" hardware driver on Debian:
=========================================================================

usrp group
----------

The Debian uhd-host package installs a usrp group.
This provides two main benefits:
 - Access control:
    The udev rules limit access to members of the group
    (at least for USB attached USRPs).
 - Real Time Priority privilege:
    The pam limits setting allows UHD to boost the
    thread scheduling priority for usrp group members.

To avail yourself of these benefits, add your username
to the usrp group, perhaps by running, as root something like:

    adduser myusername usrp

substituting your user name for myusername.
Settings will not take effect until the user has logged in and out.


Multiple packages
-----------------

uhd-host:
 The uhd-host package contains the uhd_find_devices and
 uhd_usrp_probe commands for locating and examining USRP devices
 available to the host system.

 Also, under /usr/lib/uhd/ are examples, tests and utils
 directories. The utils include tools for managing the
 flash memory or EEPROM configuration of various USRPs.

 Not installed in the Debian package are some utilities
 using mprpc (A fast MessagePack RPC library) not yet
 packages for Debian.
 aurora_bist_test
 e320_bist
 usrp_hwd

libuhd4.1.0
 Small package just for the library itself.

libuhd-dev:
 Small package just for developing applications
 using the library itself.

uhd-doc:
 Architecture: all  package providing the Doxygen generated
 html and .pdf formatted documentation.

libuhd4.1.0-dpdk:
 An alternative ABI compatible library with additional DPDK
 support and dependencies.

libuhd4.1.0-dpdk-tests:
 Some tests that link with DPDK libraries.

DPDK
____

More information at
https://kb.ettus.com/Getting_Started_with_DPDK_and_UHD
https://files.ettus.com/manual/page_dpdk.html

UHD Firmware / FPGA images
--------------------------

 The uhd-images package is not part of the main Debian distribution
 because the FPGA firmware requires non-free vendor tools to compile
 from source.

 For USRP devices with non-volatile configuration having the firmware
 images on the host is optional. But some USRPs are volatile, and
 the UHD library will fetch files from the /usr/share/uhd/images/
 directory at runtime.

 To manage this there are currently two download/install scripts
 in the uhd-host package:

 The uhd_install_firmware program is a shell script that either
 downloads FPGA image and firmware tarballs from Ettus.com or takes
 the tarball file as a command-line argument, checks the md5sum,
 and installs the files.

 The uhd_images_downloader is a python script to download from
 Ettus.com and install the files.

More Information
----------------

Online: https://kb.ettus.com/UHD

Additional HTML documentation is installed. See
file:///usr/share/doc/uhd-host/doxygen/html/index.html

 -- A. Maitland Bottoms <bottoms@debian.org>, Sun, 27 Jun 2021 21:07:33 -0400
