Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Mark Rivers <[email protected]> · Tue, 24 Nov 1998 14:25:26 -0600

Thanks to Ed Desmond's suggestion I tried using TFTP and indeed the symbol
table loaded in ~5 seconds rather than 50 seconds.  Booting using TFTP is 
done by setting the 0x80 boot flag bit on the CPU.  It also requires that your
boot host have tftp enabled, which many systems do not, since it presents some
security issues.

I also tried using rsh instead of ftp or tftp.  This also works well, loading
the symbol table in ~5 seconds rather than 50 seconds with ftp.  To boot using
rsh you leave the password field in the boot parameters blank.  You must also
create a .rhosts file in the vxWorks user account on your boot host.  This
file specifies the names of your IOCs and the user account on those IOCs.  I
think this method is somewhat more secure than tftp.

There are still 2 problems:
1) With either tftp or rsh rebooting again quickly causes the symbol table
   to take a long time to load the second time.  This happens even with a 167.
2) The behaviour of the first load of the symbol table taking 50 seconds when
   booting with ftp appears to be a bug in the board support packages
   for the 162, 177 and ppc. The 167 does not exhibit this problem.

The problems seem like they are due to the IOC "breaking the connection" to the
host, and then having to wait for a timeout period on the host before the
connection can be opened again.

Mark Rivers

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System