Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Chestnut, Ronald P." <[email protected]> · Wed, 11 Jul 2001 17:08:55 -0700

At SLAC we had arranged to funnel all licenses through one channel and had succeeded in getting a deal from WindRiver which was not too onerous. Previously we had had a community in which different parts had secured different deals at different times for different releases of VxWorks and tools. Now WindRiver wishes, nay, demands, that all be redone, and, lo, all is more expensive than before.

We currently use the 680x0 and PowerPC architectures, and must, in order to find a good NIC030 replacement for a VXI slot-0 controller, move on to the Intel family, which, to you knowledgeable of WindRiver, means a large ($15,000 instead of a few thousand for a new board) increase in cost. The alternative is to use a non-slot-0 controller, i.e. a VME processor, and hard code the otherwise dynamic VXI addressing, in the process making sure that 8 and 16 bit interrupts work, etc.

Eric Norum reported on using RTEMS. Others have reported on RT-Linux. Here at SLAC Til Straumann has looked at RTEMS and some RT-Linux. EPICS 3.14 supports these other RT systems. 

In order to attempt to clear the crystal ball and plan for the next five to ten years, I have a few questions.

1) When looking at new projects, how many are seriously researching moving off VxWorks? Where?

2) Is there a good VXI slot-0 controller solution which meets the full VXI spec? After searching to no avail, we spent a lot of time with a kinetics power PC which is now no longer available.

3) Will the powerPC survive? In other words, should new projects just move to Intel chip boards?

4) Does anyone have any surplussed NIC030 slot-0 VXI controllers? We'll pay the shipping.

/Ron Chestnut

"If you're one of those people who puts solar panels on your house or drives a battery powered car, you might as well vote for Gore"
-- Dick Cheney  Oct. 3, 2000

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System