MBSPEX and PEXORNET—Linux Device Drivers for PCIe Optical Receiver DAQ and Control

Abstract

The GSI PCI express (PCIe) optical receiver (PEXOR) family PCIe boards are used as an interface for data acquisition (DAQ) from various detector front ends, linked by up to four chains of optical fiber connections. Communication with the front-end hardware is handled by the proprietary gigabit optical serial interface protocol. A trigger module trigger for pexor extends the PEXOR by additional signal connections for triggered DAQ. For several years, the PEXOR boards have been used with the DAQ framework multibranch system (MBS). On a Linux x-86 platform, the device driver software mbspex implements concurrent access to the PEXOR front ends from MBS DAQ and from separate control applications, such as the command line tool gosipcmd or hardware specific configuration graphical user interfaces. Besides the established character driver mbspex , a network driver pexornet has been developed to evaluate a lightweight DAQ system with readout from PEXOR via a user datagram protocol (UDP) socket. Therefore, common network tools can be applied for driver configuration and data debugging. Moreover, the gosipcmd tool and its adjusted application programming interface library are fully applicable also for pexornet . A simple example DAQ application with pexornet UDP readout has been implemented with the software framework DAQ backbone core (DABC), delivering the same data file format and online monitoring capabilities as MBS. Readout performance of a test setup has been measured both with MBS/ mbspex and with DABC/ pexornet .