Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Possibility 1
The normal boot mechanism is to burn the bootrom code
into flash. What I have done on occasion (with an mv162) is to burn
standalone vxWorks into flash and place my application on
a ram disk (configured from onboard battery backed RAM)
From power on to application running takes 11 seconds.
However I have never tried this method to load epics
due to BBRAM size limitions. I think you could do something
similar with an MVME-5500.

Possibility 2
We also have other vme iocs (x86 based) that boot from an on-board
Disc-on-chip. With big enough disc-on-chip your entire application would
fit. You will need a TrueFFS driver.
See http://www.m-sys.com/

Possibility 3
Also for an x86 system. We place the bootrom code or standalone
vxWorks in flash made visible to the BIOS as "option ROM"
This takes about 20-25 seconds to get an application running
most of which is the BIOS doing its think.

-----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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References:

RE: Options for local booting of vxWorks and applications Baker, KA (Keith)

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