Re: BITBUS and PC's

[RIVERS@BNLX26.NSLS.BNL.GOV (Mark Rivers)]

Tim Mooney writes:
>> Every week I hear from someone wanting to use a PC as an IOC, either to
>> preserve an existing hardware/software investment, or to take advantage
...
>> What would it cost to port EPICS to VxWorks on a PC?

Jeff Hill responds:
> The port would require changes to the CA server to swap the bytes in
> each of the structures in db_access.h. Part of this code already
> exists in the VAX CA client library. There is also some byte swapping
> in the socket interface and the CA protocol that would need to be 
> handled. 

In this topic, Tony Cox suggested that if we begin to use little-endian CA
servers (e.g. Intel, AXP) as well as little endian clients (Intel, AXP, VAX), 
that CA should be changed to support intelligent handling of byte-order.  This
means that a little-endian server communicating with a little- endian client
should not convert everything to/from big-endian format on the network. I
think this is an excellent idea, and is, I think, how the X Windows protocol
works.

                                            Mark

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