Reports until 16:09, Friday 06 February 2015
H1 TCS (TCS)
aidan.brooks@LIGO.ORG - posted 16:09, Friday 06 February 2015 - last comment - 16:23, Friday 06 February 2015(16532)
H1 HWS not working with HWS_v1.1.8 code. Framegrabber drivers are old

I installed v1.1.8 of the HWS code on H1HWSMSR and it doesn't work (it worked fine at LLO). After some digging, it turns out that the EDT software that runs the camera does not run with 'ring buffers' at LHO. Basically, if you issue the command 'take -N 4' on H1HWSMSR, you get 'Bus error', where this works fine at LLO.

After some digging, I discovered that the framegrabber drivers are v4.2.6.8 at LHO and v5.4.1.1 at LLO. I'm going updating the drivers here and see if that helps.

Here are the changes that I made to H1HWSMSR computer

  1. Downloaded latest version of SVN
  2. Created symbolic link /opt/HWS that points to /opt/Hartmann_Sensor_SVN/release/HWS_v1.1.8
  3. Updated alias for HWS X&Y code in bashrc. Run_HWS_H1ITMX now points to /opt/HWS/Run_HWS_X/distrib/Run_HWS_X
  4. Couldn't get v1.1.8 of the code to run
  5. Changed symbolic link /opt/HWS so it points to /opt/Hartmann_Sensor_SVN/release/HWS_v1.1.6
  6. The aliases don't need changing. They automatically point to v1.1.6 now. V1.1.6 is running for HWSX. HWSY is down at the moment because there is no Hartmann plate on the sensor
Comments related to this report
aidan.brooks@LIGO.ORG - 16:23, Friday 06 February 2015 (16533)
Link

The following is a message from EDT Tech Support regarding the software problems in response to my query about the software not working on the Hanford machine.

I'm pretty sure this has to do with how the driver is supporting the Linux kernel version (or not) in 4.2.6.8. I see in our changelog, the following line for PDV version 5.3.3.3:


Support for Linux kernels 2.6.18 through 3.2.7 (but excepting 3.0.1.4)

Since 4.2.6.8 is currently loaded on a Ubuntu system with 2.6.32, I am thinking the problem is the driver doesn't quite work properly with kernel 2.6.32. We can't allocate buffers correctly. There might be a clue in the included dmesg output for your "Hanford Machine", but the truth is I don't have the expertise to understand what it is telling me.

I think the bottom line is, if you are running kernel 2.6.18 and later, you'll need to update to a more current PDV driver package.