Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Jeff Hill" <[email protected]> · Tue, 2 Sep 2003 11:17:57 -0600

> Marty Kraimer wrote:
> > An additional comments on Jeff's second suggestion:
> >
> > Fix 2:
> > There is a new field called AVAL (for asynchronous value) which is
> > initialized at the start of processing to what
> > is in the VAL field. When processing completes the AVAL field is used
> to
> > determine if monitors will be sent instead
> > of VAL.
> >
> > This does seem like it should be easy to implement.
> >
> > General Rule: Record support that allows asynchronous processing must
> do
> > this for any field for which it checks for value change before issuing
> > monitors.
> >
> > Marty Kraimer
> 
> Does this really solve the original problem? When asynchronous
> processing starts for the second put won't it overwrite what the first
> put cpoied into AVAL?
> 

Yes, that's correct, the initial phase of record processing will overwrite AVAL, but by then it doesn't matter
because AVAL will have already served its purpose which was saving the value of VAL that initiated asynchronous
processing until it completes in case dbCommon overwrites the VAL field before the device completes asynchronous
record processing.

Marty's suggestion of caching the value written to VAL during asynchronous record processing until it completes
certainly sounds like a potential improvement on my original suggestion because it fits better within the complex
record processing infrastructure. 

I should add that EPICS application developers should not be discouraged by the complexity of this particular
discussion. The topic has been the implementation details for the record processing source code which is executed
by multiple threads. The details can get to be fairly involved. The intent is for the implementation details to
become more complex so that runtime behavior will be more uniform. Therefore, if you are not writing record support
or maintaining dbCommon then the proposed fix should be perceived as a simplification to the EPICS system.

Jeff

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System