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Subject: asynPortDriver
From: "Szalata, Zenon M." <[email protected]>
To: Mark Rivers <[email protected]>
Cc: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2012 10:15:43 -0700

Hi Mark,

I am trying to understand why my device driver for a CAEN VME gated ADC module, which is based on asynPortDriver class works incorrectly.  The module has 16 ADC channels and is setup to generate an interrupt for each gate signal.  The interrupt triggers data readout and record processing.  For testing, the trigger/gate rate is 100 Hz.  The device driver maintains a gate counter, which gets incremented each time the data is processed.

So far I have three versions of the device driver.

 

1. In this version I have 16 I/O Intr scanned ai records.  The gate counter is pushed to a longin record.

    This version has the problem that the order of record processing is somewhat random and the IOC

    using this VME module requires the processing to be deterministic.  To overcome this difficulty,

   I wrote the second version.

 

2. In this version I pack the gate counter and all 16 ADC channel values into an array and this array gets

    pushed to a waveform record.  Then, the data gets distributed to ai records using  sub array records.

   This part works fine.  I have subroutine record which is processed each time the data waveform record

   is processed.  It checks for missing triggers, by expecting that the gate counter value for this data array

   is larger by 1 than the previous one.  This is where the device driver code seems to fail.

   I let the IOC run for a bit over 35 hours.  More precisely the time corresponds to 12700898 triggers.

   During this time the subroutine record reported 42 missing triggers.  They occurred spread out

   throughout the run nearly but not equally spaced in time. I have a simple print statement

   in the C routine which prints a few numbers.  These numbers tell me that the trigger incremented by 2.

   I just looked at the logic in the C routine and I see that I am not printing messages when the new gate

   counter is less than the previous one.  So it is possible that from time to time the waveform record gets

   the data out of order.  It is also possible, but I think unlikely, that from time to time the data is lost.

 

3. This version of the device driver is non-asyn.  It consists of two parts, device support and record support.

    I wrote it, by taking the second version of the device driver and replaced the asynPortDriver part with

   device support.  Also, I created a new version of the IOC, by taking the IOC which used the second version of

   the device driver and modifying the db files and the st.cmd file as needed.  I ran this IOC version

  overnight, so far it has processed 4 and half million triggers and not a single missed trigger.

 

I wonder if the behavior observed using the second version of the device driver is to be expected?

Does it mean, that for some applications the asynPortDriver approach to device driver implementation might be not appropriate?

Zen

 


Replies:
RE: asynPortDriver Mark Rivers

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