Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Aloha

 

Finally, 8 years after deploying R3.13.0beta12, we at the Keck observatory are attempting to deploy R3.13.10.

 

During about 80 hours of testing we have had 3 events of the form “ring buffer overflow” within a CA_event task. On two of those occasions the Vxworks 5.3.1 system (pPC), on which the error occurred  appeared to lose it’s connections to all it’s clients, even other EPICS empowered IOC systems. The events lasted for 7-12 minutes, after which most connections were re-established (at least one channel to another IOC did not reconnect!). On the third such event a CA_event task was suspended and the following was in the iocLog:

 

tdc2:1040 Fri Jan 20 13:42:39 2006 filename="../taskwd.c" line number=159

tdc2:1040 Fri Jan 20 13:42:39 2006 task 36a5718 CA_event suspended

tdc2:1040 Fri Jan 20 13:43:28 2006 interrupt: ./taskwd.c" line number=159

tdc2:1040 Fri Jan 20 13:43:28 2006 callbackRequest ring buffer full

 

It so happened that I was monitoring the IOC via a telnet connection, thereby logging the following, which was not in the iocLog:

 

instruction access

Exception next instruction address: 0x30303030

Machine Status Register: 0x4000b030

Condition Register: 0x42000040

Task: 0x36a5718 "CA_event"^G

filename="../taskwd.c" line number=159

task 36a5718 CA_event suspended

interrupt: callbackRequest ring buffer full

 

Seeing as the instruction address 0x30303030 is outside of the address space…  life does not seem too good.

I was not physically present during this event so I did not get a chance to perform a task trace before the IOC was rebooted.

 

I really hate to think that there is an errant pointer somewhere.

 

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

 

Thanks,

            Al Honey

            Kevin Tsubota