Re: Porting EPICS to a new OS

[Stephen Beckwith <embeddedsteve@gmail.com>]

Emmanuel,

   I just completed setting up EPICS for a customer's platform, based upon Timesys Embedded Linux.  Linux does not "follow" POSIX, it follows the LSB (Linux Standard Base:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base). 

   All I had to do was (1) above, plus add another tweak to point to the Timesys generated cross compiler. 

   The setup is cross compiled on Linux Host (Ubuntu based) and then loaded up on the customer's platform.

As noted by Eric Norum, any custom driver work will need special care.  Also, since QNX is an RTOS, you may have to lean on some of the VxWorks setups in EPICS rather than Linux when it comes to getting things started on the IOC.

Regard,

Stephen Beckwith
Embedded Linux Engineer

http://www.timesys.com

On Fri, Jun 6, 2014 at 12:15 PM, Eric Norum <eric@norum.ca> wrote:

At a quick estimate, and assuming that POSIX-compiiant really means what you and the EPICS developers think it means, I’d expect that porting EPICS base might just be a ‘1’ on the scale you’ve shown.  Are you planning on native or cross development?

Of course I wouldn’t be surprised if Mr. Murphy’s Law requires a little of ‘3’, too.

The real work comes when you want to provide driver support — especially if you want to get at local hardware I/O space and even more so if you need the ability to deal with hardware interrupts.  If all you want is ASYN-style serial and network ports things should be pretty simple.

On Jun 6, 2014, at 9:01 AM, Emmanuel Mayssat <emayssat@epicsqt.org> wrote:

Hello,

I am interested in porting EPICS to a new OS, namely QNX.

QNX is a real-time OS with a microkernel.

It is POSIX compliant.

How much work will that take?

or rather what needs to be done?

0/ Because QNX is POSIX compliant, epics-base compiles out of the box

1/ It compiles provided that I create/change files in the $(TOP)/configure directory

2/ It compile but I have to change the master Makefile of epics-base

3/ I have to change the epics-base code itself

4/ It compiles, but requires a combination of all the above

5/ ... something even more time consuming ...

6/ It is impossible.

So on the scale of 0 to 6, how big of a job is that?

Regards,

--

Emmanuel

-- 
Eric Norum
eric@norum.ca