Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

<[email protected]> · Tue, 11 Feb 2014 14:07:46 +0000

Hi, Philip.
At Diamond we have been testing Linux on one of our MVME5500 PPC boards.
It is using a patched 2.6.20 kernel, so quite old, but seems to work. Originally from Ajit Prem at Emerson, I believe, as mentioned in the 2006 presentation. The large patch file suggests it would take a lot of effort to port to a newer kernel, but I'm no expert.
At the moment it is only running on a crate with very little VME I/O so would need more testing for general use. We have not tried building the drivers for our Hytec I/O cards or other VME cards yet.
Our build includes limited VME support (only A16 addresses so far), rootfs for the file system and the Busybox toolset. Currently we load the image over the network using the MOTLoad environment parameters.
We use the linux-ppc build target.

So far we've had one operational crate running for about a year with no significant issues, except a reluctance to successfully reboot every time. It perhaps fails one in fifty attempts and requires a hard power cycle to clear. However we see similar failures on the VxWorks boards anyway, so I don't think this is a Linux issue. It seems to be a failure in MOTLoad bringing up the Ethernet interface, as far as we can tell.

I've not looked at the Denx tools and would like to comment on RTEMS.
Hope this helps,
Keith Baker

Controls Group
Diamond Light Source Ltd.
+44 (0)1235 778054

-----Original Message-----
From: Philip Taylor [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: 11 February 2014 11:22
To: tech-talk
Subject: Linux on PPC VME Boards

Is anyone running EPICS on PowerPC VME boards using an OS other than VxWorks or RTEMS? For example, using embedded Linux.

I found this presentation from the 2006 EPICS meeting:
http://www.aps.anl.gov/epics/meetings/2006-06/Operating_Systems/Linux-MVME_Targets.pdf

This recommends using an Embedded Linux Development Kit from Denx (www.denx.de).

Is anyone using something like this operationally? Is there an appropriate target defined for EPICS base? And does it have any advantage over using RTEMS?

Thanks,

Philip Taylor

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Philip Taylor                       email : [email protected]
Observatory Sciences Ltd.           Web   : http://www.observatorysciences.co.uk
Brighton Media Centre               Phone : (UK)+(0)1223-655603
21-22 Old Steine                    Mobile : 07913-720806
BRIGHTON.
BN1 1EL
U.K.

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Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System