Hello,
at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin
(https://www.helmholtz-berlin.de/) we use EPICS for our control
system.
We have a growing number of soft IOCs with Linux and VME bus
based IOCs mostly running RTEMS and
some vxWorks 5.4 (Tornado 2.02).
Our CPU boards are MVME162 and MVME2100. We have replaced more
than half of the old MVME162 boards with
MVME2100 boards, of which we bought a large supply some years ago.
After migrating most VME CPUs to RTEMS 4.9 we have run into some
problems:
- Newer CPU boards like the MVME5500 require the "beatnik" board
support, which only works with RTEMS 4.10
- RTEMS 4.10 has some problems regarding the "cexp" shell and
doesn't work on some of our IOCs.
- cexp, the shell for RTEMS is not compatible with RTEMS 4.11
and 4.12, but we need it for dynamic loading of objects
- gesys, the component that is used to create the RTEMS kernel
seems to be a bit of a mess
- RTEMS 4.11 and 4.12 are not supported by the EPICS base
- Debian Packages for RTEMS are no longer maintained
- The intersection of the people using RTEMS and the ones using
EPICS seems to be small and getting smaller, so with problems we
are much on our own
A possibility would be to use vxWorks again. Our current vxWorks
version is very old and has to be updated. Problems here:
- MVME2100 boards do not seem to be supported by vxWorks 6
- Possibly high costs for CPU licenses for vxWorks
What are your experiences with this ?
Do you still use VME bus systems ?
Is there a future for RTEMS in EPICS control systems ?
Are there alternatives to RTEMS and vxWorks ?
Greetings,
Goetz Pfeiffer