Ballard CD Deployment Time

[diegoballencantor]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Deploying one instance of the CD takes approximatelly 20 seconds in a PXIe-8881 controller. Our current application requires 5 instances of the CD running simultaneously. In this case the deployment time takes as well approximatelly 20 seconds per CD instance. That is a bit more of 1.5 Minutes just für the deployment of the Ballard CDs.

Describe the solution you'd like Is it possible somehow to reduce the deployment time of the CD?

[dbendele]

Within the Ballard MIL-STD-1553 Engine.lvlib:Custom Device.lvlib:Initialize Hardware.vi, the following VI is called to configure the Ballard MIL-STD-1553 hardware:

which takes 20 s to execute on an NI PXIe-8880 Linux RT target. Furthermore, this driver VI is not reentrant, so each call occurs sequentially. Is there a faster method to initialize the hardware?

[Karl-G1]

I was doing some performance testing on this custom device, and I found that the latest software stack results in a much faster initialization time. Doing some testing, I confirmed that Ballard's latest IPKs (version 1.3.2.2 in MAX) reduce the configuration time from 20 seconds to well under 1 second.

To get the better performance, you need to use the 21.3 or later Linux System Image (compatible with VeriStand 2020 R6) or just install the latest driver from the third-party feed directly. Here's an example of commands to execute via SSH on the target to upgrade to the latest version:

curl http://download.ni.com/ni-linux-rt/feeds/2021.5/ni-third-party/astronics-ballard-labview_1.3.2.2_core2-64.ipk -o astronics-ballard-labview_1.3.2.2_core2-64.ipk
curl http://download.ni.com/ni-linux-rt/feeds/2021.5/ni-third-party/astronics-ballard-btipci_2.10.0.1_core2-64.ipk -o astronics-ballard-btipci_2.10.0.1_core2-64.ipk
opkg install astronics-ballard-btipci_2.10.0.1_core2-64.ipk
opkg install astronics-ballard-labview_1.3.2.2_core2-64.ipk