Re: Open source Real-time Oss / open source OS

[Noboru Yamamoto <noboru.yamamoto@kek.jp>]

Hi Bob,

Dalesio, Leo `Bob` wrote:

> It seems that we are diverging on these. It is a little worrisome, as operating system problems are ones that are very difficult to find and fix. It would seem most efficient to limit the number of these that we employ.
> In an interest to at least inform the community, there should be a session at the next meeting that covers open source OS. Could people please volunteer to cover your open source RTOS at ths meeting? I know that we have had talks on some of them, but never as a concentrated topic with the express purpose and finding out if there is one that is clearly better - or if there is a compelling reason to limit our support to one (or two, or at least less than we have operator interfaces).
> Bob
>  
For KEK/KEKB,   there is a good reason to port EPICS on iTRON.
First of all, Many inteligent devices available on the market  in JAPAN 
uses SH CPU and iTRON for its inteligent
controller. That means that there already exists BSP to support this 
device on iTRON. These devices may have
enough CPU, memory and network connection. In some cases, the company 
supplies SDK for it. So once
EPICS is ported to iTRON, there may be a good chance to hook these 
devices on EPICS based network directly.
Since iTRON is quite popular in JAPAN, there would be not so difficult 
an engineer familiar with iTRON and even
support from companies.
The fact that eCos support ITRON API, I have a hope to share some code 
between osd for eCos an iTRON. It may
reduce a cost of code maintenance in future,

I agree that if I start a new project I will limit a number of (RT)OSses 
in the system. I also don't wants to increase
a number of OSes "officially supported" in EPICS. However, we should not 
restrict someone to port EPICS on other (RT)
OSes,  as far as they take their responsibility. I hope that we, EPICS 
commuity, will be open to change "officialy supported"
OSes in future, if there would be a good reason to do so. We don't even 
know if WindsRiver or PowerPC still survive after 5 to 10 years

Regards,

Noboru