Status of porting EPICS to the LynxOS/Pentium platform
T. V. Salikova1, A. D. Oreshkov1,
Ying Wu2, John M. J. Madey2
1Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics, 2Duke University
The Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS)
requires expensive hardware and software to provide the high performance
and high reliability required for the accelerator controls.
Not more than several years ago, personal computers based on Intel
x86 microprocessors lacked the computing power to compete with
workstations
such as Sun's SPARCstations. However, with the arrival of the ever
powerful,
high performance, and low cost Intel Pentium chips and Pentium clones
in the recent years, high performance PCs become an attractive
alternative
to the expensive workstations. The recent trends to search for
cost effectively solutions in the research laboratories provides
us enough incentives to port EPICS control system to a PC platform.
LANL group has used PCs successfully in the EPICS environment
in which a PC running WindowsNT (or Windows95) is employed as
a host computer to provide an operator interface (OPI).
A PC or a MVME167 mounted in a VME crate is used as a target computer
to operate as an Input Output Controller (IOC).
At present time, a standard EPICS IOC uses VxWorks as the real time
operating system. The most recent version of VxWorks is provided
by Wind Rivers as a part of a rather expensive TORNADO
integrated environment tool kit for software cross-development.
One of soluitions to reduce the overall cost of both IOC and OPI
systems,
is to port EPICS software to a homogeneous environment of PCs running
LynxOS.
This approach also simplifies the installation and development
of EPICS based control systems.
This paper will report the status of porting EPICS to the
LynxOS/Pentium platform.
Since the LynxOS provides a full set of necessary UNIX and POSIX
standard libraries, as LynxOS become available on more platforms
such as x86, PowerPC, 68K and SPARC processor families
in both native and cross development environments,
we hope that the EPICS codes ported by us can be easily adopted by
other platforms.
(posted 13-Nov-97 jw)