***** Release 3-5 *****

The main motivation for this release is the addition of new IP driver
produced by Pete Leicester and Nick Reese at the DIAMOND Light Source. This
driver should allow communicating with Ethernet based Delta Tau controllers.
Below is the message from Nick:

----
For some time I have been meaning to forward the following to you. It
contains an asyn interpose driver for an asynIPPort interface for the
Delta Tau PMAC controllers. It should be placed in the pmacApp directory
and, if properly configured, should allow you to control a number of the
Ethernet based Delta Tau controllers.

The other thing we are working on is a asynMotor record interface to the
various axes of a PMAC co-ordinate system. This will enable you to, for
example, control a monochrometer in pure energy units through an EPICS
motor record. This works, but we are trying to work out the finer points
of save/restore etc before releasing it.

[...] it should be clear that the new IP driver (and all the asyn Drivers)
are only useful for your PMAC ASCII interface and cannot provide a PMAC
DPRAM interface over the network. This is so obvious it should go without
saying, but I'll say it anyway. However, I really want to keep the code
base together, and your site is the logical distribution point.

Cheers,

Nick Rees
Principal Software Engineer           Phone: +44 (0)1235-778430
Diamond Light Source                  Fax:   +44 (0)1235-446713
----

The core part of the distribution (the MAILBOX and DPRAM communication
drivers for PMAC2-VME Ulltralite) did not change with this release.
However, now the driver has been tested to operate with both Tornado-2.0
and Tornado-2.2.

The databases and tsub routines underwent minor changes and bug fixes.

Some convenient GUI tools have been added to the Tcl/Tk part including
"Motors List", "Assemblies List" and a new frontend to homing. Homing
itself is implemented as a bunch of Perl/Pezca scripts that are not
included into this distro, but may be available on request along with
the fast scanning software that is also based on PMAC drivers.

-- Sergey Stepanov


------------------------------------------------------------
		     ***** Release 3-4 *****

Compared to 3-3, release 3-4 is basically a bug fix. The only updated
part is pmacApp/src where a long-standing bug from the initial 1996
implementation has been finally nailed down and fixed. The bug related
to improper mutexing was causing pmacMbox task to crash occasionally,
especially under high IOC load.

-- Oleg Makarov


------------------------------------------------------------
		     ***** Release 3-3 *****

New features introduced in the 3-3 release:

1) added get_enum_str() function to the statusRecord.c.
this allows to query BI00-BI31 fields of the status record for debugging.
examples:

ioc1>dbgf "23d:CCD:ml:SvoSts.BI16"
DBR_STRING:          ON
value = 0 = 0x0
ioc1>

gmca@px0:/home/gmca 1 > caget 23d:CCD:ml:SvoSts.BI16
23d:CCD:ml:SvoSts.BI16         ON
gmca@px0:/home/gmca 2 >



2) improved DPRAM-ASCII part of the PMAC driver by removing
unnecessary queue from drvPmacMbxTask() in the drvPmac.c.
Epics record get processed by the drvPmacMbxTask(), this eliminated
errors with intermixing PMAC responses under higher IOC load.


3) improved efficiency of pmacAscReadMeISR() in the pmacDriver.c
- replaced two VME bus reads of byte size by one of uint16 size,
- removed useless line at the end of pmacAscReadMeISR:
  control = getReg( *dpramAsciiInControl );

4) added support for ACC-59E in the file devPmacMbx.c. Currently the supoort
corresponds to the bipolar configuration of DAC only.