Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

[email protected] · Mon, 18 Nov 2002 10:40:11 -0600 (CST)

>I am planning to use RTLinux as the front-end OS. What should I do?
> So far,I know that I should creat a few configure files.
> Anything else?

It won't be easy to get EPICS to use the RT capabilities of RT-linux directly, although it should run perfectly happily using just the Linux parts.  RTLinux doesn't have a Posix API to the real-time parts, and there's too much code in EPICS Base that needs standard OS facilities to move any of iocCore into the real-time arena.  If you still want to look at this possibility, look at the OSI chapters in the Application Developers Guide, and the source files under <base>/src/libCom/osi.

If you just need real-time response from some of your I/O hardware then you can write your drivers using the RTLinux API and have them communicate to a non-realtime layer that is your EPICS device support.  However before looking at that problem you'll need a reasonable background of understanding how to write normal device support for EPICS, so I suggest you start with a non real-time Linux distribution (maybe use one like MontaVista which has resolved the kernel latency issues) and understand how to do I/O with that first.

Please note that many of the EPICS developers will be at the EPICS Collaboration meeting at Jefferson Lab this week, so you might not get much response for a week or so.

- Andrew

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System