Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Hi EPICS folks,

        I have some questions regarding an EPICS client and multi-threading on WINDOWS. Let me start by

laying out the development environment.

 

       I am developing an interface to an EPICS motor record using the CA API.

I am using base 3.14.8.2. I am compiling under Windows XP using Visual Studio

2008. I have successfully compiled all necessary components this way. I

know that there are no issues with the compiling because all of the

utilities and executables generated by the base are functional. My interface is

being generated in a GUI application for Windows XP. When I

start the program, the main process thread instantiates a class which

contains all of my EPICS related code. This class will connect to the

various PVs I require and store their chid objects for future access.

 

       For initialization, I call these functions from the main task.

 

int nRet = ca_context_create(ca_enable_preemptive_callback);

m_pEPICSContext = ca_current_context();

 

       I then go on to do other necessary steps for my program and eventually I

complete startup. Once startup has completed, there is a spawned thread

which will go to my EPICS class at a specified interval and retrieve new

data from the EPICS motors. This thread is priority THREAD_PRIORITY_ABOVE_NORMAL, is attached

to the main task’s context using ca_attach_context(m_pEPICSContext),

and periodically calls ca_get, then ca_pend_io to retrieve the motor data. I use

a 5 second timeout value for ca_pend_io. This normally works to successfully retrieve the motor data.

 

               However, when I launch another thread at priority THREAD_PRIORITY_ABOVE_NORMAL, and this thread keeps the CPU busy,

then for some reason the ca_pend_io function returns with timeout

(User specified timeout on IO operation expired). The WINDOWS O/S appears to swap CPU time between the two ABOVE_NORMAL priority threads,

But the ca_pend_io function still time outs. Is this expected behavior? Does the low level functionality in ca_pend_io run at a

low priority, so that it will timeout? Would the ca_get_callback function work better for this situation?

 

Thanks,

Jay Steele

Xradia Corporation