Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Kazuro FURUKAWA <[email protected]> · Wed, 20 Dec 2006 08:49:44 +0900

Hello Andrew, 

>>> On Tue, 19 Dec 2006 11:37:44 JST,  Andrew Johnson <[email protected]> wrote;
> Kazuro FURUKAWA wrote:
> > 
> > I've updated my (dirty) patch for Tru64unix at
> >   <URL:http://www-linac.kek.jp/jk/osf/base-3.14.9-pre2-osf-alpha.patch>
> 
> Janet is committing most of these changes (slightly modified) to CVS, 
> and also removing the src/libCom/osi/os/alpha directory which your 
> README says you don't use any more.

Thank you very much. 

> I have asked Jeff Hill to comment on the change you're making to the 
> src/ca/comBuf.h file - I don't see why this should be necessary if it's 
> not needed on other architectures.  He hasn't responded yet though, and 
> we won't commit that change without his agreement.
> 
> > Its test results are not optimal yet as in 
> >   <URL:http://www-linac.kek.jp/jk/osf/base-3.14.9-pre2-test-osf.txt>
> > But I believe they are minor. 
> 
> You can manually run the src/libCom/test/O.osf-alpha/epicsStdioTest and 
> src/libCom/test/O.osf-alpha/epicsTimerTest programs to see what the 
> errors are actually reporting.  The epicsStdioTest failures imply that 
> your system's vsnprintf() routine doesn't return the correct value.  You 
> can fix this by creating a src/libCom/osi/os/osf/osdStdio.c file (copy 
> and modify the posix version) to correct the OS error

You are right.  vsnprintf() is provided by libc but the behavior 
in counting of characters is different from other OS's by one.  
Do you know any free implementation of vsnprintf(), maybe freeBSD?  
I think I need to define vsprintf() locally for Tru64unix.  For 
timer error over 0.5% is also strange.  Maybe because the machine 
was overloaded like load of more than 10.  (But at the lower load 
it still showed errors with older versions...)

comBuf change is strange to me as well.  I forgot why I needed in 
3.14.4.  I'll look in these today again. 

> > To me comBuf.h seems to be OK, but ...  If you have any idea to try, 
> > please let me know.  But again, essentially I don't need R3.14.9 on 
> > HP-UX at KEKB and Linac.  So please don't be bothered too much.
> 
> That seems like a very strange error message.
> 
> > By the way, to my understanding you kindly picked up Artem's FreeBSD 
> > configuration.  Thank you very much.  
> 
> We're happy to include new architectures in the official release, 
> although we can't always test them ourselves so we will have to rely on 
> the donor doing the testing for us.
> 
> > I've also asked him to build a sort of the unit-test environment for 
> > EPICS.  And I realized that you already built it using Perl's Test 
> > environment.  Thanks for that.  He may restart the process based on 
> > your efforts.  I think such tools may enhance the reliability of 
> > EPICS installations very much. 
> 
> I hope he/you will adopt the testing setup that we've included.  I'm 
> looking to expand the testing in Base by incorporating many of the tests 
> from Marty Kraimer's mrkSoftTest application where these can be easily 
> automated.  Unfortunately automatically running tests on vxWorks and 
> RTEMS may be impossible to do, but any automation of this sort can only 
> increase the amount of testing that gets done, thus improving the 
> quality of EPICS Base releases.

Thank you very much for your effort on continuously improving 
EPICS.  Actually it's hard for me to catch up with your improvement. 
Since I began to cover KEKB as well as Linac this year, I put more 
weight on EPICS itself.  Fortunately, I've received a student, Artem, 
this year, I hope he can do some work in this field.  

Cheers.
-----
Kazuro FURUKAWA <[email protected]>
 Linac&KEKB,  High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Japan
 Telephone: +81-29-864-5200 x4316,  Facsimile: +81-29-864-0321

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System