Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Till Straumann <[email protected]> · Fri, 02 May 2008 08:22:20 -0700

Andrew Johnson wrote:

Till, Ernest,

Does what Eric describes provide what you guys need? The EPICS

rtems_netconfig.c file is really an application-specific network

configuration file so in many cases you may need to have your own anyway.

It just seems that rtems_netconfig.c mixes functionality of initializing

RTEMS

(networking, console, ...) and initializing EPICS (some generic things, some
os/RTEMS specific).

IMO it would be useful to break the two apart so that users implementing

their own RTEMS initialization can still use the pieces that deal with

initializing

EPICS (w/o having to copy/paste from rtems_netconfig.c).

- Till

- Andrew

Eric Norum wrote:

There are some mechanisms already available.

1) EPICS RTEMS support breaks the configuration/initialization into

several source files. If, for example, your application requires

some specialized network configuration, simply copy rtems_netconfig.c

to the application directory, make the changes, and add

rtems_netconfig.c to the application Makefile. To do this on a

site-wide basis, put your site-specific version of rtems_netconfig.o

into a support module where it will be linked before -lrtemsCom is

encountered. There's a separate rtems_config.c file, too.

2) As noted in the EPICS R3.14.10 release notes, there are some hooks

to make it easier to set up your own specific configuration:

Added hooks for application routines to supply special network

configuration parameters. The RTEMS startup code calls

epicsRtemsInitPreSetBootConfigFromNVRAM just before reading values

from NVRAM and epicsRtemsInitPostSetBootConfigFromNVRAM just

afterwards. See epicsRtemsInitHooks.h for prototypes and global

variables.

On May 1, 2008, at 4:10 PM, Andrew Johnson wrote:

Till Straumann wrote:

seems that 3.14.10 does a more initialization in the 'Init' function
which we don't use (e.g., because it hardcodes things like the the
amount of mbuf  (networking buffers) space [which ends up
being the same] and whether BOOTP should be used.

IMHO we should come up with a better way of initializing the system
that is more flexible (here we use a bootloader plus a small library

for connecting the bootloader, user interactive input,

non-volatile memory

and the bootee).

For the time being, IMHO 'Init' should be broken up into pieces
that
a) deal with initializing RTEMS (networking, filesystem, console)
b) deal with initializing EPICS (setting some environment variables,
   rtemsTicksPerSecond_double etc.)

The user should be able to override all of (a) but use (b) to

initialize

EPICS on an RTEMS system of her preference.

That seems entirely reasonable, can you work with Eric to come up

with a proposal and patch that works for both camps? R3.14.10 is

not set in stone yet, and it would be good to get this cleared up

before the release.

- Andrew

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System