I wanted to update everyone on the current state of GNU Radio in the new year. While we haven't had a new release out for quite a while, we are due for one soon. Over the past many months, a number of bug fixes and enhancements have been finding their way into the source code. These additions will be released shortly in version 3.3.1.
Aside from these fixes and improvements, we have been working hard on many new features of GNU Radio. Among the latest contributions to the project are:
- UHD: the Ettus Research Universal Hardware Drive that unifies the interface to the Ettus USRP hardware.
- VOLK: a set of Vector-Optimized Library of Kernels to make use of GPP SIMD instructions that should give a significant boost to the speed and efficiency of GNU Radio.
- Stream tags: a in-band signalling method for passing information through the flowgraph.
Each of these is a pretty drastic piece of work that will take time to explore and explain. I hope to publish more information in the coming months to help people make use of these features.
But we are still moving forward with a lot of new ideas for the new year. Soon, we will be moving on, which means, first, a release of GNU Radio v3.3.1. We will then be able to focus on the next release of 3.4 to include the components discussed above.
So keep an eye out for announcements as we roll out these features and releases. If you want to keep abreast of everything as it comes out, follow along with the source code in the Git repository.