Re: Generic EPICS IOCs

[Andrea michelotti via Tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>]

Hello,

At INFN-LNF, we adopted dockerization and Kubernetes in 2019 to efficiently manage one of our beam test facilities using our custom control system, !CHAOS. Through our experiences, we have become increasingly convinced of the benefits offered by a dockerized and orchestrated approach in control systems. I think this is especially valuable in addressing and mitigating the complexities introduced by an older, non-object-oriented control system like EPICS.
Considering our limited manpower for supporting custom control systems in upcoming accelerator infrastructures, we have decided to embrace EPICS, despite being relatively new to it. Starting afresh, our goal is to blend new technologies with the utilization of EPICS. We closely follow Giles' initiatives at Diamond and actively work to integrate his proposed workflows into our own, aiming for generality and maximum reuse of controls. I particularly appreciate the idea of having a tool like ibek that allows instantiation of IOCs from .yaml(s). This, combined with support for 'generic containers', offers a clean and efficient way to create 'reusable controls.'

Best regards,
Andrea

Il 15/01/24 12:36, Knap, Giles (DLSLtd,RAL,LSCI) via Tech-talk ha scritto:

Good day All,

I would like to canvas opinion on the viability of the concept of Generic IOCs.

At DLS, we have been working on moving our IOCs to Kubernetes for a while.  Part of our approach is to use the concept of Generic IOCs for our container images as follows:

• We build all the support for a given class of device into a single container image. This 'Generic IOC' has an IOC binary but no startup script or EPICS DB.
• An IOC instance is a pointer to a Generic IOC image plus enough information to generate the startup script and DB at runtime.

For a more detailed description see https://epics-containers.github.io/main/user/explanations/introduction.html#generic-iocs-and-instances.

So this means that we have a generic version of epics base built into a container image and then one generic IOC container image based upon that for each device. In none of these are any site specific changes made, all the source we use is upstream and untouched (with one or two small exceptions for compilers to work in our base OS).

The intention is that these Generic IOCs are viable for use in any facility that chooses to use containers to deploy its IOCs (using any container runtime that is OCI compliant).

Is this a bad idea? are there site specific options that cannot be avoided, and cannot be applied at runtime? 

Any thoughts much appreciated.

Regards,

giles

 

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dr. Andrea Michelotti
Head of Control Systems Service

INFN - Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati
Accelerator Division,
Bldg.2, Room 120
Via Enrico Fermi, 40
00044 Frascati (RM)

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