odbinit is a new utility program to initialize new ODB and to recover from corrupted ODB.
Right now, midas odb has some strange properties different from typical behavior of other
database packages:
a) a new odb of default size is automatically create run running *any* midas program (surprise: now
way to specify the size of odb).
b) the size of ODB is not saved anywhere. If your experiment requires an ODB of big size, one
always forgets to use "odbedit -s" when recovering from odb corruption, leading to massive
confusion: nothing works, odb is corrupted? (maybe not), recreate odb (of default size instead of
large size), reload odb, (reload fails, odb is too small), now really for sure nothing works. Been
there, done that myself 100 times. Tired.
c) there is no midas tool to automatically recover from odb corruption (or any generic ODB
malfunction, such as stuck ODB semaphore): shared memory has to be deleted, old .ODB.SHM
has to be deleted, old semaphore has to be deleted. Some of these steps are different on Linux
and MacOS (hello Apple, where is MacOS "ls -l /dev/shm"?!?).
The new odbinit tool corrects these problems:
1) ODB size is saved to .ODB_SIZE.TXT, then is used to recreate ODB after corruption recovery
2) "odbinit -s different_size_from_saved_size" will ask "are you sure?". No way to unintentionally
change size of ODB.
3) if you already have an ODB, it will insist that you say "odbinit --cleanup"
4) there is a "-n" mode, to report what will be done, but "do nothing"
5) "odbinit --cleanup" tries very hard to recover from any and all possible ODB problems.
6) old .ODB.SHM is never deleted, always renamed to .ODB.SHM.timestamp
7) if "odbinit" gets to "Done!", you have a working ODB, 100% guaranteed, for sure.
8) output of "odbinit" is very verbose for pasting into this forum here to make it possible to debug
your problem. (in the unlikely case odbinit fails).
Next step will be to remove the automatic creation of ODB (and event buffers) and require running
"odbinit" to create a new experiment. ("odbedit -s nnn" will be removed).
But not today, as all that requires changes to the midas internal APIs: ss_shm_open() needs to
return the size of connected shared memory, there needs to be ss_shm_create() and
db_create_database(), etc.
This will make ODB to work more like a normal database: with a tool to create a new database and
a tool to recover from corruption/malfunction.
K.O. |