I committed several small fixes and changes:

- install.txt which mentions explicitly ROOT
- mana.c and the main Makefile which fixes all HBOOK compiler warnings
- mana.c to write an explicit warning if the experiment directoy contains 
uppercase letters in the path (HBOOK does not like this and refuses to 
read/write histos)
- mserver.c, mrpc.c, odb.c to fix a wrong parameter in 
db_remove_open_record() (see previous entry from Paul)
- added experim.h into the dependency of the hbookexpt Makefile

Dear all,

there are continuing requests about the C indent style we use in midas. As 
you know, the current style does not comply with any standard. It is even 
a mixture of styles since code comes from different people. To fix this 
once and forever, I am considering using the "indent" program which comes 
with every linux installation. Running indent regularly on all our code 
ensures a consistent look. So I propose (actually the idea came from Paul 
Knowles) to put a new section in the midas makefile:

indent:
        find . -name "*.[hc]" -exec indent <flags> {} \;

so one can easily do a "make indent". The question is now how the <flags> 
should look like. The standard is GNU style, but this deviates from the 
original K&R style such that the opening "{" is put on a new line, which I 
use but most of you do not. The "-kr" style does the standard K&R style, 
but used tabs (which is not good), and does a 4-column indention which is 
I think too much. So I would propose following flags:

indent -kr -nut -i2 -di8 -bad <filename.c>

Please take some of your source code, and format it this way, and let me 
know if these flags are a good combination or if you would like to have 
anything changed. It should also be checked (->PAA) that this style 
complies with the DOC++ system. Once we all agree, I can put it into the 
makefile, execute it and commit the newly formatted code for the whole 
source tree.

> I want midas alarms to go off when I cannot ping arbitrary remote hosts. Is
> there is easy/preferred way to do this? K.O.

There are "internal alarms" with type AT_EVALUATED. Just find a program 
where you can put some code which gets periodically executed (like the idle 
loop in the frontend), and so something like:

DWORD last = 0;

  if (ss_time() > last+60)
    {
    last = ss_time();

    /* do a ping via socket(), bind() and connect() */
    ...

    if (status != CM_SUCCESS)
      al_trigger_alarm("XYZ Ping", str, "Warning", 
                       "Host is dead", AT_INTERNAL);
    }

Pierre does the same thing in lazylogger.c, just have a look. I don't know 
how to do a ping correctly in C, I guess you have to send an UDP packet 
somewhere, but I never did it. If you find it out, please post it.


 

Hi Paul,

I agree with you that a nesting level of more than 4-5 is a bad thing, but I 
believe that throughout the midas code, this level is not exceeded (my poor 
mind also does not hold more than 5 things (;-) ). An indent level of 8 columns 
alone does hot force you too much in not extending the nesting level. I have 
seen code which does that, so there are nesting levels of 8 and more, which 
ends up that the code is smashed to the right side of the screen, where each 
statement is broken into many line since each line only holds 10 or 20 
characters. All the nice real estate on the left side of the scree is lost.

So having said that, I don't feel a strong need of giving up a "-i2", since the 
midas code does not contain deep nesting levels and hopefully will never have. 
In my opinion, a small indent level makes more use of your screen space, since 
you do not have a large white area at the left. A typical nesting level is 3-4, 
which causes already 32 blank charactes at the left, or 1/3 of your screen, 
just for nothing. It will lead to more lines (even with -l90), so people have 
to scroll more.

What do others think (Pierre, Konstantin, Renee) ?

Ok, taking all comments so far into account, I conclude adopting the ROOT 
coding style would be best for us. So I put

indent:
	find . -name "*.[hc]" -exec indent -kr -nut -i3 {} \;

Into the makefile. Hope everybody is happy now (;-)))

Great, I got already questions about MacOSX support...

Once it's working, you should commit the changes. But take into account that using "//" for 
comments might cause problems for the VxWorks compiler (talk to Pierre about that!).

> A few hard problems:
> - namespace pollution by Apple- they #define ALIGN in system headers, colliding with ALIGN 
> in midas.h. I was amazed that the two are almost identical, but MIDAS ALIGN aligns to 8 
> bytes, while Apple does 4 bytes. ALIGN is used all over the place and I am not sure how to 
> reconcile this.

You can rename ALIGN to ALIGN8 all over the place.

> - "timezone" in mhttpd.c. On linux, it's an "int", on darwin, it's a function. What gives?

Wrap it into a function get_timezone(). Under linux, just return "timezone", under OSX, 
return timezone() via conditional compiling.

> - building libmidas.a requires running ranlib
> - building libmidas.so requires unknown macosx specific magic.

I guess we should foget for now about the shared libraries (Mac people anyhow have too much 
money so they can affort additional RAM (;-) ), but building the static library is mandatory. 

There is some information at

http://midas.triumf.ca/doc/html/Internal.html#Slow_Control_system

and at

http://midas/download/course/course_rt03.zip , file "part1.ppt", expecially 
page 59 and page 62 "writing your own device driver".

So what you are missing for your application is a "device driver" for your 
multimeter. The only function it has to implement is the function CMD_INIT 
where you initialize the RS232 port, and the funciton CMD_GET, which sends 
a "R" and reads the value. Now you have two options:

1) You implement RS232 calls directly in your device driver

You link against rs232.c and directly call rs232_init() at the inizialization, 
then call rs232_write() and rs232_read() where you read your 14 ASCII 
characters.

2) You call a "bus driver" in your device driver

This method makes the device driver independent of the underlying transport 
interface. So if your next multimeter accepts the same "R" command over 
Ethernet, you can just replace the RS232 bus driver by the TCPIP bus driver 
without having to change your device driver. But I guess that method 2) is not 
worth for such a simple device like your multimeter.

So take nulldev.c or dastemp.c as your starting point, put some RS232 
initialization into the init routine and the communication via "R" into 
the "get" routine. The slow control frontend, driven by mfe.c, should then 
regularly read your multimeter and the value should appear in the ODB. Take 
the examples/slowcont/frontend.c as an example, and adjust the multi_driver[] 
list to use your new device driver (instead of the nulldev).

I would like to mention that the usage of midas only makes sense for some 
experiemnts which require event based readout, using VME or CAMAC crates. If 
your only task is to read out some devices which are called "slow control 
equipment" in the midas language, then you might be better of with labview or 
something.

> With the ALIGN8() change ODB works, mhttpd works. ALIGN8 change now commited to cvs, verified that "make all" builds 
> on Linux.

Verified that "make all" still works under Windows.

> ROOT stuff still blows up because of more namespace pollution (/usr/include/sys/something does #define Free(x) 
> free(blah...)). Arguably, it is not Apple's fault- portable programs should not include any <sys/foo.h> header files. I 
> think I can fix it by moving "#include <sys/mount.h>" from midasinc.h to system.h.

I would like to keep all OS specific #includes in midasinc.h. In worst case put another section there for OSX, like

in midas.h:

#if !defined(OS_MACOSX)
#if defined ( __????__ ) <- put the proper thing here
#define OS_MACOSX
#endif
#endif

then make a new seciton in midasinc.h

#ifdef OS_MACOSX
#include <...>
#endif

> Also figured out why PVM is defined- more pollution from "#include <sys/blah...>". This is only in mana.c and I will 
> repace every "#ifdef PVM" with "#ifdef HAVE_PVM". Is there documentation that should be updated as well? Alternatively I 
> can try to play games with header files...

Right, PVM should be replaced by HAVE_PVM. This is only for the analyzer. I planned at some point to run the analyzer in 
parallel on a linux cluster, but it was never really used. Going to ROOT, that facility should be replaces by PROOF.

> Then, a new problem- on MacOSX, pthread_t is not an "INT" and system.c:ss_thread_create() whines about it. I want to 
> introduce a system dependant THREAD_T (or whatever) and make ss_thread_create() return that, rather than INT.

Good. If you have a OS_MACOSX, that should help you there.

-SR

> The result is strange because the get function is called all the time very 
> fast (much faster then the 9 seconds as set in the equipment) and even 
> before starting the run (I just put the flag RO_RUNNING).

This is on purpose. When the frontend is idle, it loops over the slow control 
equipment as fast as possible. This way, you see changes in your hardware very 
quickly. I see no reason to waste CPU cycles in the frontend when there are 
better things to do like reading slow control equipment. Presume you have the 
alarm system running, which turns off some equipment in case of an over 
current. You better do this as quickly as possible, not wasting up to 9 
seconds each time.

The 9 seconds you mention are for reading *EVENTS*. You have double 
functionality: First, reading the slow control system, writing updated values 
to the ODB, where someone else can display or evaluate them (in the alarm 
system for example). Second, assemble events and sending them with the other 
data to disk or tape. Only the second one gets controlled by RO_RUNNING and 
the 9 seconds. You can see this by the updating event statists on your 
frontend display, which increments only when running and then every 9 seconds.

> I want this:
> 
> mana.c does *not* include sys/mount.h
> system.c does include sys/mount.h
> 
> Simplest solution is to take sys/mount.h out of midasinc.h and include it in system.c

Agree.

> This uncovered a problem with ss_getthandle(). What is it supposed to do? On Windows it returns a handle to the current thread, on OS_UNIX, it returns getpid(). 
> What gives? I am leaving it alone for now.

The Unix version of ss_getthandle() returns the pid since at the time when I wrote that function (many years ago) there were no threads under Unix. It should now 
be replaces with a function which returns the real thread id (at least under Linux).

Dear Jan,

I had a look at your code. You create a gPhysicsEventHeader array, fill it, and expect the 
framework to write it to disk. But how can the framework "guess" that you want your private 
global array being written? Unfortunately it cannot do magic!

Do do what you want, you have to write a "secondary" midas file yourself. I modified your 
code to do that. First, I define the event storage like

BYTE           gSecEvent[ MAX_EVENT_SIZE ];
EVENT_HEADER   *gPhysicsEventHeader = (EVENT_HEADER *) gSecEvent;
WORD* 	       gPhysicsEventData = ( WORD * )( gPhysicsEventHeader + 1 );		

I use gSecEvent as a BYTE array, since it only contains one avent at a time, so this is more 
appropriate. Then, in the BOR routine, I open a file:

  sprintf(str, "sec%05d.mid", run_number);
  sec_fh = open(str, O_CREAT | O_RDWR | O_BINARY, 0644);

and close it in the EOR routine

  close(sec_fh);

The event routine now manually fills events into the secondary file:

      /* write event to secondary .mid file */
      gPhysicsEventHeader->data_size = bk_size(gPhysicsEventData);
      write(sec_fh, gPhysicsEventHeader, sizeof(EVENT_HEADER)+bk_size(gPhysicsEventData));

Note that this code is placed *inside* the for() loop over nItems, so for each detector you 
create and event and write it.

That's all you need, the full file adccalib.c is attached. I tried to produce a sec01220.mid 
file and was able to read it back with the mdump utility.

Best regards,

  Stefan

Thanks for fixing these long lasting bugs. The code is much cleaner now, please
commit it.

> I am setting up a new experiment and I added a "comment" field to "/
> Experiment/Edit on start". When I start the run, I see this field, but I
> cannot enter anything: the HTML "maxlength" is zero (or 1?). I traced this
> to mhttpd.c: if (this is a string) maxlength = key.item_size. But what is
> key.item_size for a string? The current length? If so, how do I enter a
> string that is longer than the current one (zero in case I start from
> scratch). I am stumped! K.O.

Your problem is that you created a ODB string with zero length. If you do this
through ODBEdit, a default length of 32 is used:

[local:Test:S]Edit on start>cr string Comment
String length [32]:
[local:Test:S]Edit on start>ls -l
Key name                        Type    #Val  Size  Last Opn Mode Value
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Comment                         STRING  1     32    2s   0   RWD
[local:Test:S]Edit on start>

which then results in a maxlength of 32 as well during run start. I presume
you used mhttpd itself to create the string. Trying to reporduce this, I found
that mhttpd creates strings with zero length. I will fix this soon. Until
then, use ODBEdit to create your strings.

> When I compile current cvs-head midas, I get errors about undefined function
> min(). I do not think min() is in the list of standard C functions, so
> something else should be used instead, like a MIN(a,b) macro. To make life
> more interesting, in a few places, there is also a variable called "min".
> Here is the error:
> 
> src/mana.c: In function `INT write_event_ascii(FILE*, EVENT_HEADER*, 
>    ANALYZE_REQUEST*)':
> src/mana.c:2571: `min' undeclared (first use this function)
> src/mana.c:2571: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once for each 
>    function it appears in.)
> make: *** [linux/lib/rmana.o] Error 1

This is really a miracle to me. The min/max macros are defined both in midas.h
and msystem.h and worked the last ten years or so. However, I agree that macros
should follow the standard and use capital letters, so I changed that.

> Thanks a lot. But I cannot checkout module:
> ------------
> 01:52:16: pc2075.psi.ch: Operation timed out
> 01:52:16: cvs [checkout aborted]: end of file from server (consult above
> messages if any)
> ------------

Should work fine, just tried from outside PSI. Please check again.

> Could anybody add download tar package in the WWW interface of CVS repository.
> I know the original CGI script has such a feature. Thanks.

The tar package is only done for a new release (which will happen in the next days
BTW), so http://midas.psi.ch/download/tar/ contains the most recent packages. Upon
request I make a midas-snapshot.tar.gz, but since there will be a 1.9.4 soon, it's
maybe not necessary right now.

Starting from midas version 1.9.4 on, the environment variable 'MIDASSYS'
should be defined and point to the installation directory of midas. The
purpose of that is that add-on packages (like the upcoming ROME system) can
find the midas libraries and include files. It is excatly the same as for
ROOT which defines ROOTSYS and should therefore be straight forward. The
libraries should then reside in $MIDASSYS/lib (or %MIDASSYS%\lib under windows).

To remind users about this new variable, a test has been added to odbedit,
which shows a warning when starting odbedit and MIDASSYS is not defined.

Version 1.9.4 of midas has been released today. It is mainly a maintenance
update, for all the little things which have been fixed since the last
release, and does not contain major new functionality.

> Here's my suggestion
> MIDASSYS=/opt/midas-1.9.4 (for example)   

I guess we should follow the "standard" as much as possible. MIDASSYS was inspired by
ROOTSYS. Now where do people usually install ROOT? Is it /opt/root-x.x.x or something
else. Some years ago (when I did the last time some linux administration) optional
packages were put into /usr/local by default. I guess you have more experience with
today's tradition, so do whatever you thing is standard.

> so the Linux binaries would go to 
> MIDASHOST=i386-pc-linux-gnu
> $MIDASSYS/$MIDASHOST/bin
> $MIDASSYS/$MIDASHOST/lib

Does that mean that the path has to be modified to include $MIDASSYS/$MIDASHOST/bin?
If we put a link to /usr/local/bin, the path does not have to be modified. What about
shared libraries? Does ldconfig know about /usr/local/lib, or $MIDASYS/$MIDASHOST/lib?

> and the shared stuff would go to 
> $MIDASSYS/include
> $MIDASSYS/share/drivers
> $MIDASSYS/share/examples

What about /usr/share? Is that a common place for documentatino etc?

Thanks for your advice.

- Stefan

> With POSIX there is a written standard, which says that each pacakge goes in
> it's own
> directory under /opt. eg. /opt/midas.  Each package gets to define it's own
> structure
> within that directory.  One could imagine several versions installed at the
> same time
> /opt/midas/v1.9.2 and /opt/midas/v1.9.4 each with a bin, lib include etc. 
> Following the
> ROOT example, you could make a link from /opt/midas/pro to
> /opt/midas/v1.9.4, so that
> system files and login files are easy to maintain etc.  The basic idea is
> 
> MIDASSYS=/opt/midas/pro
> PATH=$PATH:$MIDASSYS/bin
> 
> though a more sophisticated approach is
> 
> MIDASSYS=/opt/midas/pro
> echo $PATH | grep -q $MIDASSYS || PATH=$PATH:$MIDASSYS/bin
> 
> where the assignment line (Bourne shell, and BASH shell) ensures
> that multiple entries are not added on the PATH even if the script is more
> than once.

That sounds all very good to me. So can you please sit together (at least John,
Piotr, and Pierre-Andre), discuss a common scheme and and propose it officially in
this forum for comments. After a week or so, it should be implemented into the
Makefile and installation scripts. I also would like to have Paul Knowles giving
it a look, since he voluteered to make the midas RPMs, which also heavily depends
on the chosen directory structure.

Have changed your entry as Non-HTML (easier to reply to...)

Here are some "initial" comments, by no means complete...

> Are we ready for 2.0? 
> Stefan - do you have any ideas/enhancements?

A big thing along the horizon I see is the ROME environment
(http://midas.psi.ch/rome/). So we will move away from PAW to ROOT. Although
the DAQ part will stay untouched, the whole analysis back-end changes,
including some XML configuration and MySQL support. I guess that would justify
a 2.0. I will discuss this at TRIUMF when I come in September, see how useful
ROME is for other users...

> 1) For one I would like to explore memory mapping (mmap()) on Linux
> - I've used it once upon a time on DEC OSF/1 and I found it really
> nice compared to shared memory. 
> From a user standpoint it behaves as a shared memory but is mapped 
> to a real file that can be easily "removed" when neccessary. 
> One really annoying thing in MIDAS is when it goes ballistic
> the cleanup which is somewhat tricky. 
> The question if there is any performance penalty associated

I guess there are no performance penalties, since under the hood both
techniques are handled similarly. The problem is that besides share memories
you need also semaphores to controll exclusive access to the memory, either
shm() funcitons or mmap(), so this would only fix half of the problem. I seem
to remember that mmap() was not available on some Ultix systems or so, but I
guess that's obsolete by now...

> 2) Expanding hardware support: 
>    a) custom microcontrolers?
>    b) more hardware
>    c) how about a "standard" Linux device /dev/midas
>    for various PCI cards (PCI<->CAMAC) (PCI<->VME) 

Well, you cannot develop hardware support for hardware you don't have, so the
policy up to now was that everyone developing some special drivers or hardware
support contributed it to the package. About c), we have already a CAMAC
driver standard, but at the user space level, so I don't see the benefit of
having kernel-mode standardized drivers. The only difference will be that the
debugging will be harder. VME standard is there in a kind of poor start right
now, but I expect to finish it this fall.

As for a), there is the MSCB system (http://midas.psi.ch/mscb) which has midas
support on the device driver and bus driver level, but I learned that
distributing hardware (or PCB designs if you like) is much harder than sharing
software. 

> 3) I have never really seen a midas deployment that uses interrupts. 
> I do understand the ease of polling and the fact that these days
> CPU's are cheap but sometimes it is important to use interrupts.
> Any examples/experience?

It's not only the "ease" of polling, but also that it's faster (in almost all
cases) and less troublesome. But hey, interrupt support is included in mfe.c,
so if you are fanatic about interrupts, please feel free to use them.