Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Hi Olivier,

 

”the devil is in the details”…

As Ralph pointed out, the process database is backwards compatible, to a very high degree. There may be a few changes here and there but I would be rather confident that this will not be a problem in the upgrade.

 

However, the environment has had a lot of changes. With “environment” I mean systems that EPICS runs on, for instance VxWorks; if your installation has been running for a while, I guess you might still be at VxWorks versions 6 or even 5.

Getting EPICS to compile on these platforms will have issues, and for version 5 it is practically impossible. So you would have to consider what to do with these, do you want to upgrade VxWorks, or maybe even need to upgrade the hardware. Linux should be easier but you should still be prepared to do a number of the tedious small changes that Ralph mentioned.

 

Channel Access should not be an issue, I would bet it works without issues in the same way it used to. And pvAccess can run parallel to Channel Access; the “tedious small changes” are not related to pvAccess, you can even opt not to use it at all if you wish (this is certainly not a recommendation, though!)

 

It is hard to estimate how long the upgrade would take. I assume that the Linux IOCs would be fairly easy to upgrade, but there is still work to get all the drivers and device support updated and tested, etc.

I guess you would also like to update the client machines, even if old applications might work.

But the big issue would be to decide what to do with your VxWorks IOCs – and that depends on what version you have been using so far, at least assuming you still want to continue using VxWorks.

 

FWIW, we at ESS are not in regular beam production yet, but apart from a few early IOCs (Cryo, developed early) we are all on 7.0(.4)

 

Best regards,

 

Timo

 

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