Midas development:
Over the last 2 weeks (Jul26-Aug09), Stefan Ritt has been at Triumf for the "becoming" traditional Midas development 'brainstorming/hackathon' (every second year).
A list with action items has been setup combining the known problems and the wish list from several Midas users.
The online documentation has been updated to reflect the modifications.
Not all the points have been covered, as more points were added daily but the main issues that have been dealt or at least discussed are:
- ODB over Frontend precedence.
When starting a FE client, the equipment settings are taken from the ODB if this equipment already existed. This meant the ODB has precedence over the EQUIPEMENT structure and whatever change you apply to the C-Structure, it will NOT be taken in consideration until you clean (remove) the equipment tree in ODB.
- Revived 64 bit support. This was required as more OS are already supporting such architecture. Originally Midas did support Alpha/OSF/1 which operated on 64 bit machine. This new code has been tested on SL4.2 with Dual-Core 64-bit AMD Opterons.
- Multi-threading in Slow Control equipments.
Check entry 289 in Midas Elog from Stefan.
- mhttpd using external Elog.
The standalone ELOG package can be coupled to an existing experiment and therefore supersede the internal elog functionality from mhttpd.
This requires a particular configuration which is described in the documentation.
- MySQL test in mlogger
A reminder that mlogger can generate entries in a MySQL database as long as the pre-compilation flag -HAVE_MYSQL is enabled during system built. The access and form filling is then defined from the ODB under Logger/SQL once the logger is running, see documentation.
- Directory destination for midas.log and odb dump files
It is now possible to specify an individual directory to the default midas.log file as well as to the "ODB Dump file" destination. If either of these fields contains a preceding directory, it will take the string as an absolute path to the file.
- User defined "event Data buffer size" (ODB)
The event buffer size has been until now defined at the system level in midas.h. It is now possible to optimize the memory allocation specific to the event buffer with an entry in the ODB under /experiment, see documentation.
- History group display
It is now possible to display an individual group of history plots. No documentation on that topics as it should be self explanatory.
- History export option
From the History web page, it is possible to export to a ASCII .csv file the history content. This file can later be imported into excel for example. No documentation on that topics as it should be self explanatory.
- Multiple "minor" corrections:
- Alarm reset for multiple experiment (return directly to the experiment).
- mdump -b option bug fixed.
- Alarm evaluation function fixed.
- mlogger/SQL boolean handling fixed.
- bm_get_buffer_level() was returning a wrong value which has been fixed now.
- Event buffer bug traced and exterminated (Thanks to Konstantin).
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