Today marks the first tagged release of Lime Suite NG, the next generation driver stack, plus collection of plug-ins and utilities for the LimeSDR family of software-defined radios.

Lime Suite NG was first announced back in May of last year and amongst other things provides greatly improved support for SDRs with multiple transceivers, while also making it possible to aggregate multiple physical SDRs into a single logical device. Other improvements include that plug-ins for key applications and frameworks, such as the Amarisoft cellular network stack and GNU Radio, are now developed as part of the same source tree. For more of a background to Lime Suite NG and the benefits it provides, see the introductory blog post.

A significant amount of development effort has gone into Lime Suite NG and a summary of some of the key updates made since the announcement is provided below.

  • Made Lime Suite NG source a modular build
  • Add option to build source offline
  • Add packaging support for Debian Linux
  • Add DKMS support for LimePCIe driver
  • Add UART support to LimePCIe driver
  • Improved LimePCIe handling of 32bit and 64bit DMA on Arm platforms.
  • Fix LimePCIe driver to work with latest kernel versions
  • Refactored GNU Radio plug-in to allow coexisting with legacy gr-limesdr
  • Add Fairwaves XTRX Rev5 board support (with Lime Microsystems gateware)
  • Split legacy LMS_API wrapper into separate library
  • Improved legacy API wrapper functionality to better match legacy
  • Improved PCIe data streaming performance on Raspberry Pi
  • Create library of LMS7002M controls that could be used in embedded systems
  • General improvements for LimeSDR X3 board support
  • Improved sub-devices aggregation and stream synchronization for LimeSDR X8 board
  • Add more unit testing for source code and hardware functionality

New Repository

A new package repository has also been created and the first packages to be published via this are for Lime Suite NG. At the time of writing packages are provided for the following distros:

  • Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 24.04 (x86_64)
  • Debian Bookworm (Arm64/Raspberry Pi)

With more distributions to be added in due course.

See the documentation for details of how to set up the repo.