Re: What is the next step for RTEMS and EPICS? Does a small (virtual) workshop make sense?

[Gedare Bloom via Core-talk <core-talk at aps.anl.gov>]

Hello Heinz,

On Fri, Jul 14, 2023 at 2:55 AM Heinz Junkes via Core-talk
<core-talk at aps.anl.gov> wrote:
>
> Hallo,
>
> right now I see a lot of RTEMS related EPICS activity. However, these activities do not seem
> to be well synchronized (from my point of view) and also a bit jumbled.
> Wouldn't we like to meet online one afternoon (Europe time) and discuss our common approach?
> I am happy to organize this.
>
That would be nice, although the time zones are quite challenging to
cover (e.g., Europe, US, Hawaii, Australia). I have renewed interest
and motivation in this direction and would be happy to help organize
or participate.

We have recently started an #epics channel on the RTEMS discord. That
is becoming a nice place for asynchronous and chat-oriented
collaboration. I encourage any core developers interested in tracking
RTEMS/EPICS activities to lurk :)
https://devel.rtems.org/wiki/Developer/discord

> Here my view:
>
> Due to the request from some places (e.g. gemini) that the lack of NFSv4 support for RTEMS
> precludes further use, I started looking into RTEMS a little more intensively.
>
> It turned out that NFSv4 can only be realized with a (the) new network stack.
> For this new network stack Chris Johns then developed a first NFSv4 version.
> There is a PR (#295, https://github.com/hjunkes/epics-base/tree/rtems6) from
> me to epics-base which has not yet been merged. In it I tried to keep the older versions
> of Epics and also the old LEGACY_STACK running.
> I did the developments primarily on an MVME6100. Here it quickly turned out that there is no support
> for the Ethernet controller of the MVME6100 for the new stack. Then at an EPICS Codeathlon, Till Straumann
> (Danke!) built a Nexus driver for it. This then allowed NFSv4 to be used to start st.cmd, etc..
>
> Now I can also read the NVRAM settings, I am still in the process of reading the settings from U-Boot, etc.
>
> I also wanted to use ntpd and other things like ptpd etc that are now available at RTEMS. But I haven't gotten around to it yet.
>
> I had focused on the addon modules like asyn, motor, vmelib ... to get them running.
> And then got stopped at autosave from problems with writes on NFSv4, described here:
> https://devel.rtems.org/ticket/4723
>
> And now of course I'm surprised that none of the NFSv4 claimers stumbled upon it.
> And in parallel, developments are run based on the legacy stack even though it can never support NFSv4?
>
I can't speak too much to these specific concerns at the moment.
However, as luck(?) would have it, I have some unpaid days available
to me yet this summer that I will be spending looking at the situation
with RTEMS-libbsd and NFSv4.

> That's why I would be very happy if we could talk about this in a concentrated way.
>
> Danke, Heinz