Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Bill Lavender <[email protected]> · Wed, 1 Jun 2011 12:14:43 -0500

I have an EPICS server based on the channel access server library (libcas)
that runs on the PowerPMAC without any trouble.  At its heart, the PowerPMAC
is a PowerPC system running Debian Lenny with Xenomai patches.  One of its
useful features is that it comes with GCC, GDB, Make, etc. already installed
on the PowerPC side of the system.  So no cross-compilation is required.
All you have to do to build EPICS base is to select an EPICS_HOST_ARCH
of linux-ppc and it just builds.

Bill Lavender

On Wed, Jun 01, 2011 at 11:22:29AM -0500, Krzysztof Lazarski wrote:
> Bill,
> 
> In December 2009 on Power PMAC training class, I was able to compile EPICS
> on Power PMAC after adding a few missing Debian packages into the system.
> At that time Henry Bausley from Delta Tau included these packages as a
> standard on their board.
> We were interested in having EPICS ioc with SNL running on the board itself
> and we succeeded. After adding these packages compilation was
> straightforward.
> I presented results at the TWG meeting here at APS early 2010.
> I was also able to build the more convenient development environment without
> memory restrictions which are on Power PMAC board, on one of my older
> Macintosh by installing Debian for ppc architecture.
> Since that time we took different approach in our project, if you would have
> any problems building EPICS on Power PMAC, please contact me, hopefully I
> should be able to help.
> 
> Thank you,
> Christopher
> 
> -- 
> +-------------------------------------------------+
> Dr. Krzysztof Lazarski
> Structural Biology Center, Beamline Software Development Coordinator
> Argonne National Laboratory
> 9700 South Cass Avenue, Building 435 D002
> Argonne, IL 60439-4830
> ph: 630-252-3855, fax: 630-252-0564
> [email protected]
> www.sbc.anl.gov
>  +-------------------------------------------------+
> -- 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On 5/31/11 11:08 PM, "Bill Cruise" <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > I recently took the Turbo PMAC class at Delta Tau and was told that
> > their newest PMAC motion controller version, the Power PMAC, can run
> > EPICS.  It is even in their sales brochures.  If we can move parts of
> > our application inside a Power PMAC, it looks like it can provide a big
> > improvement to an upgrade project we are doing.
> > 
> > But, before jumping into this, I'd like to know if any EPICS folks are
> > running EPICS on the Power PMAC and what your experiences have been.
> > 
> > Thanks for any help,
> > 
> > Bill Cruise
> > Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope
> 

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System