EPICS Base R3.14.12: Known Problems

Any patch files linked below should be applied at the root of the EPICS base installation directory. Download them, then use the GNU Patch program as follows:

% cd /path/to/base-3.14.12
% patch -p0 < /path/to/file.patch

R3.14.12.3 Problems

The following significant problems have been reported in version 3.14.12.3 of EPICS Base and may also be present in earlier versions:

2013-01-23: If you need to use a version of Perl which is not found at /usr/bin/perl some of the scripts that come with Base will run the wrong perl. This patch changes all of the Perl preamble lines to #!/usr/bin/env perl which should be correct on all modern Unix-like systems. This line is not used on Windows systems.
2013-01-09: A fix for bug 597054 is available for sites that want their period scan tasks to not drift on workstaion OSs. Apply this patch which prints warning messages when repeated over-run errors occur.
2012-12-18: A race condition can occur when reloading the access security file from a subroutine record that is processed using caput rather than a longer-running CA client such as MEDM or caput -c. This patch fixes the problem.

R3.14.12.2 Problems

The following significant problems have been reported in version 3.14.12.2 of EPICS Base and may also be present in earlier versions:

2011-12-12: Sites using some older versions of the SunPRO C compiler may need to apply this patch to get it to build this version of Base.
2011-12-22: Databases built from a substitutions file that depend on another database built inside O.Common will fail without this patch.
2012-01-04: If you have problems on MacOS-X compiling Base in the src/cap5 directory related to it trying to compile for the PowerPC architecture, you're actually hitting a problem with Apple's installation of Perl; they didn't update the Perl configuration when they removed the PowerPC compiler support, which makes it impossible to compile Perl modules from C code without adding a workaround. If you need to use Perl scripts that use the Channel Access library you can edit the src/cap5/Makefile and change the Cap5_CFLAGS definition to be:
```
Cap5_CFLAGS = -g -pipe -fno-common -DPERL_DARWIN -fno-strict-aliasing
    
```
2012-01-11: CA clients using long string support may do a get of a DBF_CTRL_CHAR with a 1-element array, but the IOC was rejecting 1-element gets for long strings since the value should always be a single zero. In this case though the clients are only interested in the attribute data so the get should be allowed. This patch permits it, and also ensures that sub-strings fetched from DBF_STRING fields are properly zero-terminated.
2012-01-26: A bug has just come to light that was introduced into the dbpf IOC command during refactoring between Base R3.14.9 and R3.14.10. On most architectures it is invisible, but the Windows C runtime library appears to have a problem with sscanf() format strings that end with the conversion specification sequence " %n", i.e. that have a space before a request to return the number of characters consumed. With the space present the %n request gets ignored, which prevents IOCs running on Windows from converting an integer value encoded in a DBF_STRING into a field of type DBF_ENUM. This patch fixes the bug in dbpf, and removes the spaces from the conversion spec.
2012-03-19: The fix-907761 patch posted on 2012-01-11 above has been replaced with an updated version.
2012-04-30: If you use rules in your Makefiles that look like the example below, you should apply this patch to prevent problems when you use the -s flag to gnumake, or make sure that you don't have any commands on the same line as $(ECHO).
```
$(ECHO) Creating foo; ../create-foo.sh > foo
```
2012-05-14: Windows users can't call the function casStatsFetch() because the epicsShareFunc marker is missing from src/rsrv/rsrv.h. This patch fixes that.
2012-05-16: RTEMS CExp users may need to apply this patch to be able to call nfsMount(). This change is not needed if you use iocsh to run your startup script.
2012-05-21: A buffer overflow bug in dbReportDeviceConfig() can be fixed by applying this patch.
2012-09-04: An off-by-one string overflow bug in caput -S can be fixed by applying this patch.
2012-10-10: The monitor deadband fields of several record types can get stuck if the ALST or MLST fields become NAN. This patch resolves that problem.
2012-12-05: On Windows systems, do not use WinZIP to extract the source tree from the Base tar.gz file if you are planning to build it for the cygwin-x86 host architecture. Doing so causes the build to fail when it reaches the src/bpt directory. This might not happen if your Cygwin installation is configured to use DOS line-endings, but we haven't tried that to see. Use the tar program provided with Cygwin to extract the source tree instead.
2012-12-13: Cygwin users must apply this patch to be able to build Base when SHARED_LIBRARIES=YES. Without it you can expect to see this error when the build first runs antelope.exe: RULES_BUILD:230: recipe for target `parse.c' failed

R3.14.12.1 Problems

The following significant problems were reported in version 3.14.12.1 of EPICS Base and subsequently fixed in version 3.14.12.2:

2011-05-23: Cygwin builds on drives other than C: can fail when gnumake first tries to link the antelope.exe program, with an error message like ld: cannot find -lCom. This patch fixes that problem, which was not present in R3.14.12.
2011-06-27: On MacOS X machines when running a 64-bit kernel the two versions of the EpicsHostArch script both return the wrong result. This patch modifies those scripts to give the correct output.
2011-07-07: Some combination of Windows 7 and MinGW Make try to compile C files using the C++ compiler, which doesn't work. Apply this patch to delete the old build rule that causes this problem.
2011-07-21: VxWorks systems that do not use a PowerPC CPU may see the error message initHandlerAddrList() unsolicitedHandlerEPICS not in sym table. Apply this patch to resolve this problem.
2011-07-26: Some versions of GCC for specific processors don't like certain legal C++ constructs which are rarely used and result in an udpiiu.cpp:1391: error: generic thunk code fails for method ... message. Apply this patch to resolve this problem, which is bug 816678.
2011-10-20: Multi-threaded CA clients (such as recent versions of the sequener) that run inside the IOC process may miss monitors from local channels without this patch, which fixes bug 878372 and bug 878387.
2011-11-01: The caget and camonitor programs have not properly handled array PVs since R3.14.12, especially when using the -#n option with multiple PVs at the same time. The camonitor code could also crash if an array PV disconnects and later reconnects with a larger size array. This patch resolves these problems and fixes bug 794749.
2011-11-08: Building 3.14.12.1 using gcc version 4.6 or later requires this patch which is a combination of the two patches attached to bug 736273 which was fixed back in August.
2011-11-09: There is a bug in the makeBaseApp.pl script when using the cygwin-x86 architecture; it outputs windows-style paths in the generated configure/RELEASE file, i.e. C:/EPICS/base instead of /cygdrive/c/EPICS/base. This patch fixes the problem.

R3.14.12 Problems

The following significant problems were reported in version 3.14.12 of EPICS Base and subsequently fixed in version 3.14.12.1:

2010-12-14: When building IOCs with a Win32 target architecture, the generated xxx_registerRecordDeviceDriver.cpp file can cause a number of warnings to be reported because we don't properly escape the back-slash path-separator characters in the bldTop string.
2010-12-16: Stephen Norum reported the above and some related issues in the convertRelease.pl and fullPathName.pl scripts. This patch can be applied to fix these problems.
2011-01-07: If errlogPrintf() is called during shutdown, it can cause a recursive assert failure. This patch from Michael Davidsaver fixes the issue. This is bug 693534.
2011-01-13: The native element count for array fields is truncated by the IOC server to 16 bits, so (unless you use the dynamic array sizing features that were new in this release) it is not possible to transfer more than 65534 elements of an array from an IOC without applying this patch and rebuilding Base and the IOC. Note that the CA client library is not affected, just the rsrv server code. This is bug 701673.
2011-02-16: Problems with an IOC running on Windows when communicating with local CA clients might be solved by applying this patch, which might also solve some issues with non-IOC CA client programs. This is bug 717252.
2011-03-01: Systems that generate a lot of errlog output can trigger a bug in msgbufGetNode() that overwrites older messages in the output buffer. This patch fixes that problem and modifies the errlog test program to match.