Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Folks,

 

mca R7-5 is now available.

 

These are the major items from the release notes:

- Fixed a serious bug in the Canberra support when libpcap was being used on Linux. Previously pcap_open_live was being called with a timeout of -1 (ms). This actually causes pcap to enter a tight polling loop where it uses 100% of the CPU time. The timeout was changed to 0, which means wait for a packet to arrive. The CPU time was reduced to 1%-2% for the test IOC, but the MCA and ICB performance (updates/sec, etc.) appears to be the same. Note that timeout of 0 does NOT work on Windows, and the previous value of -1 works fine, so the timeout was not changed on Windows or Cygwin.

- Minor changes to the Canberra support to work on Darwin. Darwin uses the BSD "bpf" library for raw packet reading. It requires setting the Ethernet interface into BIOCIMMEDIATE mode to receive packets immediately, and not have the OS buffer them.

- Previously the WinPcap DLL files were installed into the mca/bin/$(ARCH) directories. This does not work with Windows 7, because the DLLs that work on XP don't work on Windows 7. The DLLs are no longer distributed with mca. They were actually never needed because it was always necessary to install the WinPcap package to run an application built with Canberra support. This is because it requires drivers that were not distributed with mca. So the required DLLs will always be available on the target machine, and they are guaranteed to be the correct versions.

- Added support for the programmable high-voltage power supply in the Canberra DSA-2000. The MCA and DSP controls in the DSA-2000 were already supported. The file iocBoot/iocLinux/st_DSA2000.cmd is used to test this, and the mcaTest.adl medm screen can be used to load the new DSA2000_HVPS.adl screen.

The home page is here:

http://cars9.uchicago.edu/software/epics/mca.html

 

The release notes are here:

http://cars9.uchicago.edu/software/epics/mcaReleaseNotes.html

 

Let me know of any problems or suggestions.

 

Mark