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Subject: Re: how often do you use Tornado IDE tools for vxworks programming
From: Bruce Hill <[email protected]>
To: 王林 <[email protected]>
Cc: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2011 16:39:42 -0800
Hi Lin,
My group at SLAC doesn't use vxWorks for EPICS, as all of our
IOC's are either linux or RTEMS based. However, I did work on
real-time audio/video systems based on vxWorks for about 18
years. During that time, vxWorks went from 5.1 to 5.4 and Wind
River introduced the Tornado IDE.

Virtually no one in those development groups used the Tornado IDE
as it didn't help with the problems we needed to solve. The IDE
did make it easy to create different BSP's, (Board Support Packages),
in which you choose how your board boots up and which vxWorks
libraries will be available. Since we already had a BSP which
met our needs we didn't use Tornado when it came out. Later, when
I did create new BSP's for new boards, I found I had more control
by just editing the configuration files by hand.

The gcc tool set that comes with vxWorks is needed, but that's
totally separate from Tornado. We did use gdb when we could get
it to work, but didn't use gdb all that often as it was tricky to get
working and since we were connecting via ethernet, if a serious
crash occurred often the network stack would be affected as well
and we'd lose the gdb connection.

Note that the vxWorks shell has good debug capabilities built in,
including breakpoints, stack traces, examining variables, etc,
but that's available without using Tornado.

The WindView tool seems interesting and possibly useful if you
have problems with thread synchronization, but we typically solved
those problems by enabling diagnostic log messages.

My EPICS experience has been that low level debugging is used
even less in EPICS than in traditional hand coded applications, so
if you aren't doing low level module development, your EPICS
developers will likely have little need for the Tornado tools.

Best regards,
- Bruce Hill

On 01/05/2011 08:08 AM, 王林 wrote:
> Hi All,
> In brief, Tornado provides us a cross compiler(such as gcc) and some cross debug tools(such as CrossWind, Browser, WindShell, WindView and VxSim).
> Because of the EPICS build system, we hardly need to run the Tornado IDE when develop EPICS applications for vxworks, and I was ever told that many Tornado tools have no use to us. However, the Tornado tools seem to be widely used in companies and universities by those Windows programmers who don't use EPICS, for example they use them to debug vxworks modules via WDB. So I am confused about how important the Tornado tools are, whether they are important for vxworks programming or only optional tools for programmers who like to use IDE.
> Actually, I have only a little experience of vxworks, my question, how often do you use the Tornado IDE tools for vxworks programming? Often, a little, or never? For example, when develop and test EPICS drivers or EPICS core. 
>
> Thanks,
> Lin Wang
>   

-- 
Bruce Hill
Member Technical Staff
SLAC National Accelerator Lab
2575 Sand Hill Road M/S 10
Menlo Park, CA  94025



References:
how often do you use Tornado IDE tools for vxworks programming 王林

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