EPICS

on Google+

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Windows Information

This page provides a repository for information about building EPICS on Microsoft Windows. If there are any mistakes here, or you find any other information that ought to go on this page, please let me know.

In May 2010, Carsten Winkler (BESSY) posted a set of instructions to tech-talk for building Base R3.14.11 with Visual Studio 2010 Express on Windows XP.

There is a similar page to this one at KEK which goes into more detail and shows some older compilers and different versions of Base.

Compilers and Build tools

EPICS can be built on Windows using the MinGW version of GNUmake, either ActiveState or Strawberry Perl, and your choice of MinGW GCC, Microsoft's commercial Visual Studio C++ compiler, or the free Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 or 2010 Express Editions. Alternatively it can be built using the Cygwin versions of GNUmake, Perl and GCC, which may be the simplest approach as far as installation goes but the performance using Cygwin is not as good as with the other compilers.

Microsoft API (win32-x86, win32-x86-mingw or windows-x64)

Download and install a compiler:

• Microsoft Visual C++ Express 2010, or
• MinGW version of GCC
• You can also use Microsoft's commercial C++ development tools if you have them.

In addition to the compiler, you will also need the following free tools:

• Perl: Either ActiveState Perl or Strawberry Perl will work.
• GNU Make (must be version 3.81 or later): Either the GnuWin or the MinGW version (problems reported with this though)

To extract the files from the EPICS Base distribution on a Windows system, you will need a copy of WinZip, 7-zip or another equivalent program, or some of the following packages:

• MinGW MSYS
• GnuWin LibArchive, which contains the bsdtar progam
• GnuWin Patch is useful for applying patch files

After extracting the EPICS Base source code, look in the base/startup directory for the win32.bat file which you can edit to help you set up the necessary path and environment variables for building base.

If you wish to cross-compile for a vxWorks target you will obviously need to have Wind River's Tornado or WorkBench software installed, and to edit the base/configure/os/CONFIG_SITE.Common.vxWorksCommon file.

Cygwin with GCC (cygwin-x86)

Download the Cygwin Installer and run it. When installing Cygwin to use with GCC, you may set the "Default Text File Type" to be either Unix or DOS depending on whether you expect to use other Windows-specific tools with this installation or not.

Note: It is reported that Cygwin version 1.7 does not successfully build some EPICS Base versions, although some modifications allow it so create a static version. Cygwin version 1.5.x works fine though, and this problem may have been fixed in the latest release of Base.

You will need to select at least the following Cygwin packages for installation:

• gcc-core
• gcc-g++
• make
• perl

The installer will add extra packages on which the above depend automatically. In addition to the above, the following packages are useful to have:

• gdb
• openssh
• readline
• vim

After the packages have been installed, use the cygwin tar program to extract the EPICS Base sourcce code. If you didn't install the readline package edit the file configure/os/CONFIG_SITE.Common.cygwin-x86 and comment out the COMMANDLINE_LIBRARY setting. At this point the only thing you need to do to build Base is to open a Cygwin bash shell window, set EPICS_HOST_ARCH and run make in the top level directory of Base:

$ export EPICS_HOST_ARCH=cygwin-x86
$ cd epics/base
$ make
...