Re: RTEMS BSP for MVME8100

["Johnson, Andrew N. via Tech-talk" <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>]

Hi Kukhee,

On Apr 26, 2021, at 12:15 PM, Kim, Kukhee via Tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov> wrote:
> 
> We are in SLAC, are still using MVME6100 and MVME3100 with RTEMS.
> Since these have been obsoleted, we are getting pressure to secure the spares for these.
> We found that MVME8100 has a better price in the market even it is faster and advanced.
> Thus, we are considering the MVME8100 as a replacement for MVME6100 and MVME3100.
> 
> We are looking for RTEMS BSP for MVME8100, does someone have RTEMS BSP for the MVME8100?

There is nothing in the RTEMS source code which indicates BSP support the the MVME8100 board already exists, although there is support for the MVME2500 which could probably replace your MVME3100 boards (and may be faster for some systems since it has a hardware floating-point unit). The qoriq_e500 BSP that runs on the MVME2500 doesn’t actually support access to the PMC or VMEbus ports yet, but we (APS) are working on fixing that.

One distinction you should be aware of with the MVME8100 (and some versions of the MVME2500) are the multiple CPUs, since many EPICS VME card drivers were written to assume there is only one CPU. Converting EPICS VME drivers and device support to work properly on SMP systems may take quite a bit of effort; it’s not something that I have ever done, and for our recent APS-Upgrade purchase we were careful to only purchase the 1-CPU version of the MVME2500 to avoid having to confront that issue.

The Core Developers are about to merge the RTEMS-5 port into the EPICS 7.0 branch so EPICS should be ready to run on RTEMS-5.1 in the fairly near future, but will still support RTEMS-4 systems using the older kernel APIs and network stack.

- Andrew

-- 
Complexity comes for free, simplicity you have to work for.