vxWorks Shell

PhreaK

Let me preface this with a big fat do not try this at home. If you do not know what you are doing do not start poking around spawning or killing tasks, especially not on any production system. I take absolutely no responsibly for anything you break.

Now with that out of the way if anyone wants to get all the way down to the vxWorks shell on the NI's you can do so without even opening the case. If you flick on dip switch 3 this will switch the program port to a debug port that gives you full access to the vxWorks shell. It will also override the buad you have set with switch 6, 7 and 8 to 115200, N, 8, 1.





Now, as to what you can do with this, I was hoping there may be someone else on the forums that has more of a vxWorks background than me (read: absolutely any previous experience what so ever).

jjames

I messed around in the shell last year for several weeks and found nothing of major use. A couple of cool little things, but nothing I'd write home about. You almost have to look at each function that you can call to see if it's of any importance to you. There is a search command to pull up the functions, but there are so many, it'll take you a while to sort through them all.

Have fun!

nicholasjames

No experience in VxWorks, but recently dug around myself after seeing someone post about it (you?).

One benefit I found from it was that it automatically started the "msg on all" text on the serial port the moment the processor booted. Normally to get to that state quickly you have to use a program (like SecureCRT or Indigo) to auto-connect. Unfortunately that has never worked for me with SecureCRT on any AMX processor's serial port unless the power is pulled. Plus, the serial defaults to "echo off" on boot.

The boot up messages definitely gave some interesting info that could be of use later, such as how many persistent variables it was reloading. Additionally the "spy" command didn't cause the processor to freeze up on me like it normally did on the serial port.

The only issue I've seen was on 2 older processors (and older VxWorks). They would fail in using their assigned IPs and require DHCP.