Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

[email protected] (John R. Winans) · Fri, 10 Feb 1995 08:13:16 -0600

I agree with your logic flow 100% WRT internal data structure sizes and
implied sizes and so on.  However, I would rather see the IOC data structures
completely rethought.  Let them become what ever the native machine wants,
clean up the int <-> void* assignments, and simply do all transfers of the
database in ASCII.  This would allow all the iocCore code to compile into
what ever byte size and sex it wants... who cares?  Lose the 'for the
sake of speed' code that is not portable... or at least provide ifdef'd
alternates so that EPICS can be made portable.

That would leave the CA code... it has to be fixed anyway.

There is, however, going to be some trouble with the drivers.  I am not sure
that they can be made as portable.  They will ALWAYS require an exact byte sex
and size when they are defining their register maps.  I suppose your typedef
idea would be a good start at it.  But there is always going to be timing
and BSP-dependancies that some of them will not be able to overcome.

--John

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System