Re: Information request on RTEMS 4.10 needs/wants

["Johnson, Andrew N. via Core-talk" <core-talk at aps.anl.gov>]

Hi Gedare,

On Feb 11, 2021, at 2:28 PM, Gedare Bloom via Core-talk <core-talk at aps.anl.gov> wrote:

There's a proposal that was floated 3 years ago and is recirculating
within the RTEMS development team to consider a long-term stable
branch of rtems-4.10. I'd like to gather some information about
possible interest or non-interest from EPICS. The key question is:
Would you like to include long-term stable 4.10 releases in any
open/maintained EPICS versions?

I can’t speak for other labs, but the APS at Argonne currently has around 100 RTEMS 4.9.2 and 4.10.2 uC5282 systems of several different types in our operational systems. Because of the limited size of that CPU board we don’t know whether those systems could be upgraded to RTEMS-5, and we don’t have the effort available right now to find out. As a result we want future EPICS releases to continue to build and run on RTEMS 4.10, and we have been contributing effort to ensure that EPICS will continue to work on 4.10 after we merge in the RTEMS-5 port. We haven’t needed to build newer RTEMS 4.10.x versions at APS, although I believe some other labs may have been using newer tagged versions. 

Now speaking as an EPICS Core developer the EPICS CI process on GitHub Actions current runs our built-in unit tests against both 4.9 and 4.10 on i386 under qemu, and for RTEMS-5 we will test against i686 under qemu. We could add other architectures too if they can be made to run under qemu. The RTEMS builds that we use are compiled by Michael Davidsaver – we don’t try to use the latest RTEMS git version and I’m not sure exactly which tags his images were built against.

I will respond to your other email too…

- Andrew

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