THE PXI AND VMEBUS SUPPORTS FOR THE LINUX BASED EPICS
K. H. Kim, M. K. Kim, M. K. Park, J. W. Choi, InHyung Choi, M.C. Kyum, M. Kwon · 2005
Conventionally, Experimental Physics and Industrial Contro l System (EPICS) has been used on the VxWorks Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) before EPICS release R3.14 which was developed with Operating System Independent (OSI) technology. Now, it can support other Operating Systems (OSs). However, EPICS can operate with other OSs just being used as a softIOC, i.e. without hardware modules, because even now it does not have real hardware support on other OSs. Recently, some of the Board Support Packages (BSPs) for Real-Time Executive for Multiprocessor Systems (RTEMS) Real Time Operating Systems (RTOS) have been made in the EPICS community but they are restricted only to the PowerPC based VMEbus system. Alternatively, we have considered the Linux operating system as a next EPICS operating environment and made some progress on the PCI Extensions for Instruments (PXI) and VMEbus supports. We made genericPXI device supports which can support almost all of National Instrument’s Data Acquisition (DAQ) modules based on PCI, compact PCI (cPCI), and PXI. Additionally, we also have a plan to extend it to support Timing and Signal conditioning modules. We also made the vmeUniverse driver support which is a VMEbus support. It provides application programming interface (APIs) functions similar to VxWorks and the configuration features based on IOC shell commands. We have provided it to the KEKB and JPARC control groups in Japan and they examined it to measure the performance of interrupt handling. The results satisfied their requirements to adopt it as a part of their control system. We will describe the details of implementations of both genericPXI as well as vmeUniverse and will present the test results of vmeUniverse.