artdaq

In the protoDUNE DAQ, the Warm Interface Boards (which sit between the TPC cold electronics [front-end mother boards] and the data-combiner boards [RCEs and FELIX boards]) are configured by dedicated BoardReader processes. (A different design choice could have been to have the RCEs and FELIX boards handle the configuration of the WIBs, but that was not chosen.)

protoDUNE has seen problems in which a second Configure command to an individual WIB BR has the possibility of causing that BR to crash at the subsequent BeginRun (Start). That's documented in a different Issue. It's not clear that it's related to a configure-only BR, but it would be nice to have an environment to test whether that is true or not.

A related question that came up was the following: in the case in which a configure-only BR crashes at Begin-Run, why does data taking not continue normally (in a non-mpirun system). This is also an interesting question that could be explored with this type of simple-test-config.