Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Andrew Johnson <[email protected]> · Wed, 8 Sep 2010 14:16:49 -0500

Hi Qiao,

On Wednesday 08 September 2010 12:20:04 Geng, Zheqiao wrote:
>
>    I work for Ernest and I am currently working on the EPICS applying on
> uTCA. I would like to take some time to investigate the dynamic record
> loading for EPICS base 3.x, so that we can estimate the feasibility and
> efforts for introducing this new feature.
>
>    Could you please kindly offer me some materials about the current design
> of the EPICS base? Such as the requirements specification, design report
> and so on. I have only in hand the IOC design manual, which is far from
> enough to study into the core codes.

The EPICS code is over 20 years old.  I don't believe those kinds of documents 
were created when it was first written, and even if there were they have not 
been kept up to date.  We have a few documents that describe how the original 
designs came about, but any details in them will be of little use when trying 
to understand the current code-base.  Take a look at this page for them:
	http://www.aps.anl.gov/epics/docs/general.php
The Application Developer's Guide and the Record Reference Manual pages on the 
EPICS Wiki are the only significant code documentation that exists, other than 
the source code itself.

How much experience do you have working with EPICS, creating IOC database 
applications, CA client programs or writing device or driver support software?  
Does your background include developing embedded systems and writing multi-
threaded software?

You will really need to have a good understanding of all of those technologies 
plus the APIs provided by libCom and dbStaticLib before you can realistically 
understand the internals enough to implement dynamically adding records to a 
running IOC.

- Andrew
-- 
The best FOSS code is written to be read by other humans -- Harald Welte

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System