Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Hello,

at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (https://www.helmholtz-berlin.de/) we use EPICS for our control system.

We have a growing number of soft IOCs with Linux and VME bus based IOCs mostly running RTEMS and
some vxWorks 5.4 (Tornado 2.02).

Our CPU boards are MVME162 and MVME2100. We have replaced more than half of the old MVME162 boards with
MVME2100 boards, of which we bought a large supply some years ago.

After migrating most VME CPUs to RTEMS 4.9 we have run into some problems:

• Newer CPU boards like the MVME5500 require the "beatnik" board support, which only works with RTEMS 4.10
• RTEMS 4.10 has some problems regarding the "cexp" shell and doesn't work on some of our IOCs.
• cexp, the shell for RTEMS is not compatible with RTEMS 4.11 and 4.12, but we need it for dynamic loading of objects
• gesys, the component that is used to create the RTEMS kernel seems to be a bit of a mess
  
• RTEMS 4.11 and 4.12 are not supported by the EPICS base
• Debian Packages for RTEMS are no longer maintained
• The intersection of the people using RTEMS and the ones using EPICS seems to be small and getting smaller, so with problems we are much on our own
  

A possibility would be to use vxWorks again. Our current vxWorks version is very old and has to be updated. Problems here:

• MVME2100 boards do not seem to be supported by vxWorks 6
• Possibly high costs for CPU licenses for vxWorks

What are your experiences with this ?

Do you still use VME bus systems ?

Is there a future for RTEMS in EPICS control systems ?

Are there alternatives to RTEMS and vxWorks ?

Greetings,

  Goetz Pfeiffer