Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Gedare Bloom via Core-talk <core-talk at aps.anl.gov> · Fri, 12 Feb 2021 12:15:54 -0700

On Thu, Feb 11, 2021 at 3:46 PM Johnson, Andrew N. <anj at anl.gov> wrote:
>
> On Feb 11, 2021, at 2:32 PM, Gedare Bloom via Core-talk <core-talk at aps.anl.gov> wrote:
>
>
> I'm looking to collect some feedback from you all related to
> EPICS+RTEMS. I'm trying to also keep in touch with monitoring the
> progress on EPICS7/RTEMS5 (And, I'm planning to participate with
> students in the upcoming hackathon! if you have tasks related, I might
> be able to help knock them out). My ask right now is:
> * What feature improvements would you like to see in future RTEMS releases?
> * What are your pain points with current RTEMS versions and/or workflows?
>
> And anything else positive/negative you'd like to put out here is
> certainly welcome.
>
>
> To add to Michael’s response:
>
> One feature that I know my IT department is looking forward to is an NFSv3/NFSv4 client, which I know has been funded. I was concerned when this was described as being for RTEMS-6 so I would be interested in the changes that have been made to the release numbering scheme since RTEMS-5, and when RTEMS-6 is likely to be released. I just found and read this so it doesn’t look like you’re using Semantic Versioning (but neither is EPICS).
>

We switched to Major.Minor numbering, so the next major release will
be 6 instead of 5.2. All minor releases will now be maintenance
releases. Although we always hope to accelerate our release times,
they've historically been done with volunteer time mostly so it is
hard to predict. I think someone sponsored Chris to push 5 out. As he
has continued to improve the release processes, hopefully they can get
smoother. I expect 6 will land sometime this calendar year, the big
change is the new build system.

> Progress on our RTEMS-5 port of EPICS Base can be followed at this GitHub PR.
>
> I suspect Michael’s question about the VMEbus driver may have come from a possibly misleading comment in one of the build configuration files for new RTEMS-5 target in the above PR. When talking to VMEbus devices EPICS needs the memory probing routines found in Till Strauman’s rtems-libbspExt module which I understand is not an official part of RTEMS and has not been ported to use the Posix APIs. My group will need EPICS and VMEbus support for RTEMS-5 on the qoriq_e500 BSP (MVME2500 board) within a few months, so we’re interested in any news about plans to merge or replace Till Strauman’s module. We will have someone who can work on and/or test this if necessary
>
I'm not aware of anyone within the RTEMS side who looks at that
module. I would encourage you/EPICS Core to get someone to engage with
the devel at rtems.org community how to proceed. Depending on the clarity
of the scope of work, it might be possible to describe it as a
suitable Open Project for a Google Summer of Code student to take a
stab at. Often, they can do some of the early heavy lifting, and then
a maintainer can push it through to production.

> - Andrew
>
> --
> Complexity comes for free, simplicity you have to work for.
>

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System