Re: "Hard" IOC on commodity hardware

["Winter, Graeme \(DLSLtd, RAL, LSCI\) via Tech-talk" <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>]

Thanks Chris - this was a very useful pointer

https://docs.rtems.org/branches/master/user/bsps/arm/xilinx-zynq.html

I have a Zynq 7000 dev board (Zybo Z7-20) on my bench here which was mentally filed under "FPGA development board" rather than "ARM development board" so I missed it completely

Will explore that arena

Appreciated!

All the best Graeme

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From: Tech-talk <tech-talk-bounces at aps.anl.gov> on behalf of Chris Johns via Tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>
Sent: 02 April 2024 03:32
To: tech-talk at aps.anl.gov <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>
Subject: Re: "Hard" IOC on commodity hardware

 

On 2/4/2024 4:55 am, Winter, Graeme (DLSLtd, RAL, LSCI) via Tech-talk wrote:
> I was keen to run up some "hard" IOCs at home for a learning exercise but I
> don't think a VME crate would go well with our home decor...
>
> What's a good development platform for e.g. RTEMS for EPICS development?
> Raspberry Pi support seems patchy, but something in the same part of the
> ecosystem would work well. 

I have been running RTEMS + EPICS 7 on a Xilinx ZynqMP 64bit AARCH board for
testing recently. The aarch64 has really good libdebugger support and that was
useful. Things mostly worked and the support needs some patches that are on
github under kiwichris (somewhere). It has been a bunch of months since I last
played with it. If you are into playing you could push the boundaries by
enabling SMP and run EPICS on real-time SMP.

If that type of board is out of range there are Microzed or Picrozed type boards
and with uboot on an SD card loading RTEMS over a network is a fast test and
development environment. It should be a similar experience to the ZynqMP.

> Is this something people do?

Yeap I do.

> I know all the cool kids are doing containerised
> soft IOCs these days, but I am not cool.

I am not cool and build things from source

Chris