Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Andrew Johnson <[email protected]> · Tue, 31 May 2011 15:31:11 -0500

Hi,

Congratulations, you discovered one of the reasons that we completely replaced 
the way the IOC code gets the current time in Base R3.14.10.  The older code 
does work well enough for soft timing IOCs, but it is not obvious exactly how 
it does it.

On 2011-05-30 you wrote:
> But in the EPICS3.14.8.2, this routine is like this:
> int iocClockGetEvent(epicsTimeStamp *pDest, int eventNumber)
> {
>      if (eventNumber==epicsTimeEventCurrentTime) {
>          *pDest = piocClockPvt->clock;
>          return(0);
>      }
>      return(epicsTimeERROR);
> }
> Which does not call routine iocClockGetCurrent(), instead, just return the
>  value of piocClockPvt->clock. And I can not find another routine who calls
>  iocClockGetCurrent() except date(). So I think when a record is being
>  processed, if both the field TSE and TSEL are 0, then recGblGetTimeStamp()
>  calls epicsTimeGetEvent(), epicsTimeGetEvent() calls iocClockGetEvent(),
>  iocClockGetEvent() returns the value of piocClockPvt->clock, but by this
>  sequence, piocClockPvt->clock seem to be static and updated only by ntp
>  server every 10 second, and  how does the record get the updated EPICS
>  time every time it is processed? As I have tested on
>  MVME5100/VxWorks5.5.1, a record with a "1 second" SCAN field get the
>  updated TIME field value every second very well, but I do not understand
>  how EPICS achieve this.

In R3.14.8.2 piocClockPvt->clock is set by the syncNTP() routine every 10 
seconds, but is also adjusted every time any other code in the IOC calls 
epicsTimeGetCurrent() since that ends up calling iocClockGetCurrent().  There 
are many calls to that routine, and in particular the code that implements the 
periodic scan threads calls it before and after triggering every periodic 
scan, so it should always be right to within 0.1 seconds (or whatever your 
fastest scan rate is) and better if you only have a few records in your 
periodic scan.

If you need better accuracy your IOC will contain some kind of hardware timing 
or event system, which replaces the iocClockGetEvent() routine with its own 
code by calling iocClockRegister() and thus avoids the bug that you have seen.

As I said above, in newer releases of EPICS Base we have replaced this code 
with a better implementation called "general time" which does properly fetch 
the current time from the OS every time a record processes.

- Andrew
-- 
Optimization is the process of taking something that works and
replacing it with something that almost works, but costs less.
-- Roger Needham

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System