Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Rees, Nick (DLSLtd,RAL,DIA)" <[email protected]> · Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:15:48 +0100

We have a need to run IOC's on Linux without a stdin and are looking for
the best way to set this up. The IOC's are to be used in a test harness
so need to be run up and down automatically and repeatedly.

The obvious thing to do was to duplicate what is done with the "softIoc
-s" command, which is to execute the startup script and then call
epicsThreadExitMain. The problem is that once epicsThreadExitMain is
called the process shows up as <defunct> and doesn't respond to normal
signals and only dies with a kill -9.

The solutions we can think of are:

1. Wrap the IOC in screen or procServ and so it has a stdin
2. Don't call epicsThreadExitMain, but install a signal handler that
gives a semaphore and then takes the semaphore.
3. Use kill -9 to kill the IOC.

Is there a recommended way to do this? In many ways, option 2 seems
best, but there should be an Epics call that does that for us. I don't
know of one, but would be happy to contribute one if it was supported.

Cheers,

Nick Rees
Principal Software Engineer           Phone: +44 (0)1235-778430
Diamond Light Source                  Fax:   +44 (0)1235-446713
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Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System