Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Benjamin Franksen <[email protected]> · Wed, 15 Jul 2015 13:55:56 +0200

On Tuesday 14 July 2015 12:16:38 Pete Jemian wrote:
> Is your analysis of "expensive" based on initial cost, total life
> cost, or perhaps some other criteria?  Our experience at the APS,
> including interfacing cable systems, has been that VME has offered us
> a lower total life cost than commodity or rack-mount PC systems.
>
> On 7/14/2015 10:20 AM, Mark Davis wrote:
> > ...  we have been slowly eliminating VME ...  The hardware is just
> > so much
> more expensive than using fairly
>
> > generic rack-mount PCs running Linux and using Ethernet (directly or
> > via Ethernet-to-serial/GPIB/whatever adapters) to talk to
> > stand-alone devices.

Also note that Linux is not a real-time system, which may or may not be
a problem depending on the application. It may also be a potential
security risk, given that the amount of readily available tools for an
attack is much larger on Linux (or any other general purpose OS like
Windows or MacOSX), compared to VxWorks or RTEMS. And cutting something
like Linux down to the essentials needed for running one or more soft
IOCs (in order to avoid these risks) is not something I'd take on
lightly.

Cheers
Ben
--
"Make it so they have to reboot after every typo." ― Scott Adams

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Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System