Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

I think the replies to my operation system question may be of more
general interest, so I will forward all the ones which were addressed to
me privately.
-- 
+-------------------------------------------------+
| Rolf Keitel, TRIUMF         Tel: (604) 222-7453 |
| Group Leader ISAC Controls  Fax: (604) 222-7307 |
| and Electronics Development                     |
| Vancouver, B.C., Canada                         |
+-------------------------------------------------+

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Subject:	Re: vxWorks, other ops
From:	Kay-Uwe Kasemir <[email protected]>
To:	Rolf Keitel <[email protected]>
Date:	Fri, 10 Aug 2001 13:54:57 -0600

At 01:29 PM 8/10/2001, you wrote:
>For some short-term and long-term planning I would like feedback on:
>
>a) vxWorks for Intel x86 architectures.
>  Who is using it?
>  What PC configurations are covered?
>  Which problems were encountered?

Hello Rolf:

It's used here at LANL on the Low Energy Demonstration Accel.
I worked on the original port of EPICS base (for vxWorks on x86)
in 1996, but then I left and after I returned, LEDA was running,
so I didn't witness the actual installation.

 From what I know, there are 10-15 EPICS IOC PCs out there on LEDA.
Many of them are slower PCs (~<500Mhz), I believe even motherboards
from office PCs that were replaced with faster machines.
They are re-mounted in 19inch rack-mountable industrial PC crates,
some with hot-swappable dual power supplies.

For I/O, they use Greenspring IP modules. While I wrote the original
drivers, now I'd suggest to go with IP drivers based on Andrew
Johnsons's IP software (handles the different IP carrier boards for VME
and PCI).

The PCs actually boot Windows95. Then a shortcut to
"c:\vx\vxload c:\vx\boot.rom" was created that has the options
set to run in DOS mode
-> You click that and the machine switches to DOS mode and then
runs vxWorks.
 From now on it's like any other vxWorks IOC:
It loads vxWorks over the network, then loads iocCore, ...

The trick is: Since for Windows95 the shortcut to vxload never "returns",
on reboot you will see "Running your DOS program, press ESC to skip".
-> From now on, you'll always get vxWorks after a reset or power cycle,
unless you press ESC on reboot, which brings you back into Windows95.

There is no non-volatile memory that vxWorks uses on the PC:
The boot parameters (IP address, startup file) is part of the "boot.rom"
file. So you need one such file per PC, you cannot use "bootChange"
to modify is but have to create a new boot.rom and transfer it to the PC
(which you can do when booting Windows95).

 From what I know the PC IOCs work fine.
The industrial PC 19" crate eliminates some of the cost savings from using old PCs,
but it's still cheaper than VME.

The I/O count is limited because you only have few PCI slots and
getting the cables from there out of the crate is cumbersome,
VME is much nicer in that aspect.

-Kay

--- End Message ---

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