In this technical note, I write down the workings of the midas event buffer code, the path 
that events travel from the frontend to the SYSTEM buffer to mlogger (and to disk).

The event buffer code has worked well in the past, but more recently we see a few 
problems. There is the event buffer shared memory corruption problem in the alpha-g 
detector daq. There is difficulties with GET_RECENT. There is timeouts in bm_receive_event 
RPC path in ROME. There is the 2Gbyte size limit on the event buffer size (limiting 
maximum event size to about 1Gbyte), due to the 32-bit-ness of the event buffer size code. 
In the day of 10gige networkwing (1Gbyte/sec) and >1Gbyte/sec storage arrays, 2Gbyte 
buffer size is just about sufficient. There is lack of multithread safety in the event buffer 
code. There is the lack of bm_receive_event() where I do not have to guess the maximum 
event size (making event truncation impossible).

I have been looking at the event buffer code for many years. It is extremely very well 
written,
but it is also probably the oldest code inside midas and it's age shows. Good code from 
1998 is just very hard to read and follow 20 years later in 2018. We no longer do "goto", we 
are not afraid of using malloc(), we declare variables as we are about to use them (instead 
of at the beginning of a function). The list goes on and on.

So after looking at this code for many years, I finally decided to bite the bullet and 
rewrite/modernize it. To my surprise the code took very well to this. I only had to rewrite 
the parts that use difficult to follow "goto" logic, the rest of the code almost refactored 
itself. I think this is a very good thing to happen as the basic logic remains the same and 
people already familiar with old code (Stefan, myself, etc) will find that while things moved 
around, the basic logic remained the same.

But first, we need to understand and write down how the event buffer code works.

to be continued,
K.O.