Re: migration from old EPICS Base

["Hartman, Steven M." <hartmansm@ornl.gov>]

Hello Jiro

When I was at the Duke FEL, I updated IOCs from base 3.12 (or was it 3.11?) and one even from base 3.9!

I wrote device support for the VMIVME 3122 and 4116, and for VMIVME digital input and digital output boards (not the same as yours but similar). The code compiled and ran on both 3.13 and 3.14 IOCs, but was VxWorks specific. It should not be very difficult to update them to use the OSI layer to be able to run under RTEMS. 

The Duke website that hosted the code is no longer available, but I'll see if I can find it for you. 

--

Steven Hartman

hartmansm@ornl.gov

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From: Jiro Fujita <jiro@creighton.edu>
Date: December 2, 2015 at 11:28:17 EST
To: EPICS tech-talk <tech-talk@aps.anl.gov>
Subject: migration from old EPICS Base

So, here is a question to people who has been in the control business for a while. 

At STAR experiment at Brookhaven National Lab, we still have some IOCs running EPICS Base 3.12 (as well as 3.13 and 3.14).  Since prior to EPICS 3.14, we could only use EPICS with VME boards, they are running on VME CPUs.  All of them are basically frozen systems.  We do boot them from a Linux host, but we have not made any changes to them for several years. 

As we try to deal with the aging older hardware, I have found that we are still using the following VME boards in those old EPICS Base 3.12 based IOCs:

VMIVME 1111     64-bit High-Voltage Digital Input Board
VMIVME 2232     32-Channel Relay Output Board
VMIVME 3122     16-bit Analog-To-Digital Converter Board
VMIVME 4116     8-Channel 16-bit Analog Output Board
LeCroy 1176 TDC Time-to-Digital Converter Board
Acromag AVME 948X Digital I/O card

I realize many of VMIVME boards are listed in EPICS Hardware Support section, but many of them has no contact person listed (nor the code), not clear if it is supported in EPICS Base 3.14. 

Does anybody by any chance still use them with EPICS Base 3.14 or even 3.15?  If you do, please let me know.  Note that if we are to move VME IOCs to EPICS Base 3.14, it is very likely that we will use RTEMS instead of VxWorks (mostly cost issues).  So any experiences of migrating from VxWorks to RTEMS is also welcome. 

If anybody have replaced them to something newer that are better supported in EPICS Base 3.14/3.15, I am also interested to hear what you replaced them with. 

My thought is that anything that's currently running with EPICS Base 3.12 stable, we should leave them alone in general, given the lack of man power and budget to move them to newer systems.  However, my boss thinks otherwise, so I was given a task of looking into the possibilities and options.