Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

John Hammonds <[email protected]> · Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:16:03 -0600

I have implemented a system like this for the beamlines at the APS but
warn that this gets a bit messy. Actually it turns out that setting
this up is fairly trivial but using it gets to be a bit of a pain. As
you said, on the build side this is basically just creating the new
architecture files for the different builds and setting your host arch
properly. In our case we ended up with linux-x86-fc4(now defunct),
linux-x86-fc6 and linux-x86_64-el5, (we had solaris-sparc-v10-gnu,
solaris-sparc-v09-gnu, and solaris-x86-v10-gnu as well). After copying
the correct files (i.e. CONFIG.Common.linux-x86-fc6,
CONFIG.linux-x86-fc6.Common, CONFIG.linux-x86-fc6.linux-x86-fc6,
CONFIG_SITE.linux-x86-fc6.linux-x86-fc6) from there originals I
basically just set the EPICS_HOST_ARCH and then did make on an
appropriate host. This got us through a fair number of incompatibilites
in the systems.
The downside of this is now maintenance and use. On the use side I set
up some scripts to analyze the system type and set the appropriate host
arch. On the maintenance side it depends alot on the size of the
facility and your ability to limit what kind of systems are out there.
You may face the problem of not being able to advance everyone at the
same time and then figure out keeping the environment for all users correct.
HTH,
John
On 3/10/2010 8:45 AM, John Dobbins wrote:

I was wondering if anyone can suggest an approach for building EPICS
on multiple linux distributions (which may have different kernel
versions, compiler versions, etc.)
Does one define new architectures linux-x86-distribution_a
linux-x86-distribution_b?
John Dobbins
Lab for Elementary Particle Physics
Cornell University

--
John Hammonds
Beamline Controls and Data Acquisition Group
APS Engineering Support Division
Argonne National Laboratory
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
(630)252-5317

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System