Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Mark Rivers via Tech-talk <[email protected]> · Fri, 12 Apr 2019 18:19:51 +0000

New releases of the following areaDetector modules are now available.

areaDetector R3-5
ADCore R3-5

These are from the R3-5 release notes for ADCore:

### Documentation
  * Converted documentation from raw HTML documentation to .rst files using Sphinx.
  * Added a new docs/ directory which replaces the old documentation directory.
  * The old .html files were converted to .rst using [pandoc](https://pandoc.org).
    Most documentation includes tables that describe the plugin parameters and
    record names.  These tables do not convert well to .rst so they have been left as native
    html in the files.
  * The new documentation is hosted at [areaDetector.github.io](https://areaDetector.github.io).
  * Many thanks to Stuart Wilkins for this major effort.

### ADDriver, asynNDArrayDriver
* Fixed a race condition in R3-4 with NumQueuedArrays and AcquireBusy.
  This caused AcquireBusy to sometimes go to Done before the plugins were done processing.
  A typical symptom was for successive points in a scan to have the same values from the statistics plugin,
  because the detector did not wait for the plugin to post a new value before it said it was done.
  The logic for this was moved from the database (ADBase.template) to the driver (ADDriver.cpp).

### NDArray
* Changed the codec member from a std::string to a structure that contains not just the name of the codec
  but also the compression level, shuffle parameter, etc.

### NDPluginCodec
* Added support for the lz4 and bitshuffle/lz4 codecs.
  These are the compressors that the Eiger uses, so compressed NDArrays from ADEiger can
  now be decompressed by NDPluginCodec.
  The ImageJ pvAccess plugin in ADViewers now also supports decompressing lz4 and bitshuffle/lz4.
  These codecs are independent of Blosc, which also supports lz4 and bitshuffle but with some differences.
* Fixed a problem with NDPluginCodec.template for the Blosc codec.
  The Bit and Byte shuffle values in the BloscShuffle records were swapped so when Bit shuffle was selected
  it was actually doing Byte shuffle and vice versa.

### NDPluginAttribute
* Changed the time series support to use NDPluginTimeSeries.  This is very similar to the change that
  was made in R3-3 for NDPluginStats.
  This significantly reduced the code size, while adding the capability of running in Circular Buffer mode,
  not just a fixed number of time points.
  Thanks to Hinko Kocevar for this.
* EXAMPLE_commonPlugins.cmd has changed to load an NDPluginTimeSeries plugin and database for the NDPluginAttribute plugin,
  so the local commonPlugins.cmd file must be updated.

### commonDriverMakefile
* Added support for bitshuffle.  This was added in ADSupport R1-7.
  To use it set WITH_BITSHUFFLE=YES in areaDetector/configure/CONFIG_SITE.local.

### NDFileHDF5
* Added support for Direct Chunk Write.  This allows the plugin to directly write compressed NDArrays from
  NDPluginCodec or from the detector driver (e.g. ADEiger).
  This can significantly improve performance by bypassing much if the code in the HDF5 library.
* Added support for bitshuffle/lz4 compression, which is independent of Blosc.
* Added support for lz4 compression, which is independent of bitshuffle and Blosc.
* Added FlushNow record to force flushing the datasets to disk in SWMR mode.
* Changed the enum strings for compression (Blosc, LZ4, BSLZ4) to be compatible with NDPluginCodec.
  This may break backwards compatibilty with clients that were settings these using the enum string.
* Fixed many memory leaks.  The most serious ones were causing ~100kB leak per HDF5 file, which was significant when
  saving many small files.
* Changes to allow it to run correctly with the unit tests on Windows and Linux.

### NDFileHDF5.template
* Previously the size of the XMLFileName waveform record was set to 1048576.
  This only needs to be large if using it to transmit the actual XML content, which is not typical.
  Changed the size to be controlled by the macro XMLSIZE with a default of 2048.
### asynNDArrayDriver, NDPluginDriver, NDArrayBase.template, NDPluginBaseFull.adl
* Added support for new parameters NDCodec and NDCompressedSize and new records Codec_RBV and CompressedSize_RBV.
  These contain the values of NDArray.codec and NDArray.compressedSize.

### NDPluginBase.template
* Removed DTYP from the MaxArrayRate_RBV calc record which does not support DTYP.

### pluginTests
* Changes to allow unit tests to run on Windows if boost is available.

****************************************************************************************

The home page is here:
http://cars.uchicago.edu/software/epics/areaDetector.html

The top-level documentation is here:
http://cars.uchicago.edu/software/epics/areaDetectorDoc.html

<http://cars.uchicago.edu/software/epics/areaDetectorDoc.html>areaDetector.github.io

Installation instructions are here:
https://github.com/areaDetector/areaDetector/blob/master/INSTALL_GUIDE.md

areaDetector release notes are here:
https://github.com/areaDetector/areaDetector/blob/master/RELEASE.md

ADCore release notes are here:
https://github.com/areaDetector/ADCore/blob/master/RELEASE.md

Mark

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System