Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Baker, KA (Keith)" <[email protected]> · Wed, 10 Nov 2004 15:54:07 -0000

Hi, Andy.
I assume your application is too large to fit in the on board Flash (32MB on
MVME5500), otherwise that would be the easiest and cheapest solution. You'd
need to build a boot image with VxWorks and your application built-in
(simple to do with Tornado), then load it onto the board. The down side is
that during development it's rather slow to make any changes.

Many years ago I worked on a system with the neat solution of a Flash card
adapter in one of the PMC slots on the processor card (MVME2304), which was
thin enough to still only take up one slot.
I wan't really involved in setting this up but do remember that it used the
WindRiver package TrueFFS (True Flash File System) to manage the flash disk.
This obviously made the interface to VxWorks easy as it just required
changing the boot device name in the boot parameters. I think from a console
window we could ftp (get) new files from the server to the card then reboot.
TrueFFS was also intelligent in how it wrote to the disk to maximise the
life of the Flash, by cycling round the area of disk it did new writes to
rather than writing over the same area again and again. There may still be a
downside of having a DOS file system with 8.3 size filenames.
I would guess a new bootROM would also need to be built initially to load
the FFS and then maybe some extra stuff in the VxWorks image, like an NFS
Client for downloading new files.

I hope this was some use,
Keith Baker
Diamond Control System
+44 (0)1235 778054

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Andy Foster
Sent: 10 November 2004 15:11
To: Epics Questions
Subject: Options for local booting of vxWorks and applications

Hello All,

I was just investigating what options there are for booting
vxWorks applications locally, rather than across the network and
was wondering if any sites are already doing this?

It seemed that one option is to use a SCSI device with a DOS file
system attached.

Is anyone using Compact Flash or any other type of local memory?
I am really interested in solutions for the MVME-2700 and
the MVME-5500 (in the future).

What we are trying to achieve is faster local boots, reducing the
network traffic at system startup.

Many thanks for any comments and/or examples.

Cheers,

Andy

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Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System