Blue line 1/2/4/8 PRI PCIe available from Dialogic

Finally got in the hands new Dialogic hardware. All together it is a new family of host media processing hardware:

Low Profile Blue Line 1 PRI PCIe
Half Size Blue Line 2/4/8 PRI PCIe

The half size boards are equipped with DSP (Digital Signal Processor) for offload of most resource extensive and critical task - G.168 Echo Cancellation.

Boards are supported by standard Dialogic Diva product release and drivers and are exposing same API. This is no problem to use the board with chan_capi. This is just like to Diva boards, only certain media processing features which available on Diva are not available with Blue Line. But Blue Line is even more powerful compared to Diva PRI CTI boards: Echo cancellation is performed using hardware DSP, supporte real time media (RTP). Of cause processing extensive vocoders are not supported by Blue Line.

The Blue Line driver self is provided as binary toolkit and adapter to kernel at build time. This works without problems. Once loaded driver spreads his processing power across of multiple CPU and seems to run at software interrupt level.
At same time user mode driver provided just in case kernel mode driver can not be build. This is no difference taken a look from API which driver is used. But kernel mode scales better.

The conferencing is available too, chancapi "chat" command works without problems.

Taken all together is is very simple to use - just like Diva hardware, using same installation, build and configuratiuon tools.

Diva media streaming for chan_capi allows reduction of host load

Using the Diva server board the only one processing overhead in the system is the transport of voice data between Asterisn and Diva hardware.

Diva media streaming allows to eliminate this overhead.
Diva media streaming allows to transport data between Diva hardware and the user application by PCI/PCIe BUS Master DMA. Due to mapping of DMA buffers to user mode this eliminates the overhead on copy of data (or remapping of data buffers) between address spaces and between host memory and system memory, strongly reduces the interrupt load.
With other words the overhead is eliminated at all by the fully new design of interface between Diva hardware and the user applications.

Diva streaming was used as the internal transport between Diva drivers, Diva hardware and Diva API. And now it is available under GPL license as part of the chan_capi code.

Very Large conference with chan_capi and Diva hardware

Very large conference is one full duplex conference with 240 ... 900 members.
To implement such large conferences this is necessary to break the conference in the groups and to transmit only the summary group signel between groups (while inside of the group signal is built by any-to-any transmission of signals).

The most critical part if the creation of the groups, binding of certain media processing resources to groups and selection of the communication resources for transmission of signals between groups.

chan_capi implements the algorith to perform all mentioned tasks automatically. All the user has to do is to provide "g" option to capicommand "chat". With this option chan_capi will automatically create groups, distribute the required by groups media media processing tasks between available hardware resources and establish the paths betwee groups in the most efficient way. This allows to achive not only the best usage of the avvailable hardware but to minimize the introduces by transmission of summary signal delay.

New features

Beside of compatibility with Asterisk 1.8 multiple new features are includded in the chan_capi:
+ "capi exec" cli command allows to execute any of ssupported "coimmands". This allows
for example control of media processing by conference operator.
+ "capi show resources" cli command allows to view media processing resources in use
+ Distributions of calls only to interfaces (E.1/T.1/S0/POTS/SS7) which are in active
state and are able to process the calls
+ "capi show ifcstate" cli command allows to control state of interfaces in use
+ AMI events for interface state
+ MeetMe compatible AMI interface (events, commands) for chan_capi conferencing
(capicommand(chat))

Asterisk 1.8 chan_capi support

Newest available relase of chan capi (svn co svn://svn.chan-capi.org/chan-capi/trunk chan-capi-trunk) supports Asterisk 1.8.

Diva PCIe Hot Plug test

Yes, it works. All Diva PCIe hardware ssupports PCIe Hot Plug inclusive surprise removal.

All you need is to load appropriate PCIe Hot Plug module (pciehp).

In case hot plug is not working please try to use pciehp_force=1 pciehp module parameter.

More about test, used mainboard will follow.

Diva 8PRI 4LANE PCIe 8 x E.1/T.1 1 x 450MHz MIPST RISC 24 x 600MHz DSP 20WT

For unlimited voice, fax and modem, 20WT only