RE: SENS from WRS and PowerPC; working

[johill@lanl.gov (Jeff Hill)]

Markus,

Here are the known problems integrating the EPICS with the WRS SENS 
IP kernel (which appears to be mandatory in Tornado II):

1) There is a SENS supplied m_type macro which collides
with the CA source codes. This is fixed in 3.14.

2) There are problems querying the available network interfaces using
the socket library. This causes the CA client library to break
unless additional (non-standard) configuration steps are taken.
This also causes the CA server to neglect to send beacons
unless additional (non-standard) configuration steps are taken.
I have a TSR outstanding with WRS for more than a month on this.

3) There is an initialization order problem which causes trouble
when a messages about (2) is attempted. This is fixed in 3.14.

4) During high throughput load testing of Channel Access I have been 
experiencing SENS IP kernel lock ups. This appears to be related to
buffer space starvation, but I am unable to reliably fix the problem
when I increase the buffer space available to the IP kernel. So far,
I don't see anything that we are doing to cause this problem.

You may be able to work around (2) by setting EPICS_CA_AUTO_ADDR_LIST=NO
and then configuring EPICS_CA_ADDR_LIST to the broadcast address of
the network interface in your IOC. This can be determined by typing
"ifShow" at a vxWorks shell prompt.

How many sites are waiting for EPICS to be made available under 
Tornado II?

Jeff

> 
> there has been an e-mail about the new "SENS" IP kernel from Wind
> River Systems on tech-talk dated December 7, 1998 by J. Hill. In there
> he recommended to not specify the "SENS" option when building Tornado.
> This has the drawback that WindView is not available.
> 
>  The problem is that there is a name clash for the PowerPC
> architecture. WRS defines in one of their header files (net/mbuf.h) a
> macro m_type which clashes with a variable of the same name in a
> structure used by Channel Access. I changed the name of the variable
> m_type in the code of CA (10 files had to be changed) and now CA seems
> to work with the SENS IP kernel!
> 
>  The files that were changed are given below. The path is relative to
> EPICS_BASE/src/
> 
> ca/access.c
> ca/caProto.h
> ca/service.c
> cas/generic/casClient.cc
> cas/generic/casClientMon.cc
> cas/generic/casCtxIL.h
> cas/generic/casDGClient.cc
> cas/generic/casStrmClient.cc
> cas/generic/outBuf.cc
> rsrv/camessage.c
> 
>  I tested the new EPICS with the new kernel on a couple of IOC
> applications and discovered, so far, no new problems using EPICS
> 3.13.0.beta12, Linux as host and mv2306 as target. A test on solaris
> and mv167 will be done next week, but I don't expect any
> problems. Could the above mentioned changes included later into the
> EPICS distribution? Jeff?
> 
>  Cheers, Markus
> --
> +---------------------------+--------------------------------+
> | Markus Janousch           | e-mail: markus.janousch@psi.ch |
> | Computing & Controls, SLS |                                |
> | Paul Scherrer Institute   |    Tel: +41-56-310 3275        |
> | CH-5232 Villigen-PSI      |    Fax: +41-56-310 4413        |
> +---------------------------+--------------------------------+
> 
> 
>