Re: EPICS task watch dog

[Till Straumann <strauman@slac.stanford.edu>]

On 05/01/2011 11:32 PM, Szalata, Zenon M. wrote:
> Thank you Andrew, Eric and Till,
>
> My thinking was to upgrade the existing IOCs and support modules
> needed by those IOCS with minimum necessary modifications to avoid
> altering functionality.  Part of the problem is that the IOCs use
> extensive and complicated sets of EPICS records, custom record types
> for which support is built into the device drivers (support modules)
> and I am not very familiar with the inner workings of all that. So, I
> was thinking to do the transition in two steps; first to just get the
> software upgraded and moved from the solaris platforms where the
> software is presently maintained, the second would be to take one
> system at a time and re-implement
^^^ please note that just 'OSIfying' a driver is a *much* easier
task (which can often be done by just using a set of macros
or sed scripts) than re-implementing a driver. Can usually be
achieved in a few hours.

- T.

all device drivers to be OSI as
> needed, perhaps using asynPortDriver... I realize that once the first
> step is completed successfully, the second step may never be taken.
> Zen
>
> > -----Original Message----- From: Andrew Johnson
> > [mailto:anj@aps.anl.gov] Sent: Sunday, May 01, 2011 8:33 PM To:
> > tech-talk@aps.anl.gov Cc: Szalata, Zenon M.; Straumann, Till
> > Subject: Re: EPICS task watch dog
> >
> > Hi Zen,
> >
> > On Sunday, May 01, 2011 21:38:53 Szalata, Zenon M. wrote:
> > > Till, Thank you for your input. I understand your suggestion.
> > > There is another related issue, which I am not sure about. In the
> > > existing driver code, the task is created with a call to vxWorks
> > > routine taskSpawn(...).  Here is a code fragment:
> > Actually if you follow Till's suggestion properly you would replace
> > *all* the calls to vxWorks-specific routines in the driver with
> > their EPICS equivalents. Instead of taskSpawn() you use
> > epicsThreadCreate(), etc.  This has the advantage that the
> > resulting code can be compiled for and will run on RTEMS, but it is
> > a bit more work since the EPICS versions are not all direct
> > replacements for their vxWorks counterparts.  Eric Norum produced a
> > Wiki page describing the conversions of the various routines, which
> > you can read at this link:
> > http://www.aps.anl.gov/epics/wiki/index.php/How_to_make_your_EPICS_driv
er_operating_system_independent
> > If you don't want to put that much effort into this, on vxWorks you
> > can just cast an epicsThreadId into an integer for use as a task-id
> > in vxWorks routines and vice-versa.  That is not possible on other
> > operating systems though.
> >
> > HTH,
> >
> > - Andrew (waiting for Obama's special news conference to start)