Jeff, Thanks for the reply. I checked out your link, and most of the lingo is beyond my knowledge and experience.
It looks like, in order to get optimal performance, people dedicate a computer and an os to running emc2. I am the kind of user who will be building my own machine and running it with a computer that I use for many things. I will also be using the parallel port to drive some avr-based stepper drivers that I am building from a kit. Although, the rt-19 kernel does not have as good performance as the rtai kernel, I think it would be a good idea to make emc2 compatible with the -rt kernel. That way, people like me who are just getting into cnc, can try emc2 without having to buy an addional hard drive or repartition an existing hard drive. Getting the highest travel speed is not top on my list of priorities, just getting the tool chain working is my main concern. Emc2 on Ubuntu Studio would push that distro into new realms. I see all of the open- cad, cam, nc tools eventually making it into this creation suite. That would be huge, imhno (in my humble noob opinion). Thanks, dfro Jeff Epler wrote: > The ubuntu "-rt" kernel is not compatible with emc. Only the "-rtai" > kernel is compatible with the precompiled version of emc, and only > "rtai" and "rtlinux" realtime kernels are supported for compiling emc. > > The ubuntu "-rt" kernel does not provide the APIs that are used by emc2 > for its realtime components and hardware drivers. One reason that we > have not worked to support "-rt" is because it generally offers lower > realtime performance on the same hardware compared to rtai. > > My limited experience with the "-rt" indicates that it might be OK for > "smart hardware" like mesa/ppmc but probably not for "dumb hardware" > like software step generation on the PC parallel port. > > I believe that an interested developer with a knowledge of kernel and/or > pthreads programming could write a new implementation of emc's "rtapi" > compatability layer for the Ubuntu Studio "-rt" kernel. Personally, I > would be happy to consider such a patch for inclusion in the development > version of emc. You can find some work I did along these lines a year > ago here: > http://axis.unpy.net/01190912545 > however I am not sure that the userspace/pthreads approach is the right > one, because it means that HAL device drivers can't use kernel APIs such > as pci_find_device and ioremap_nocache. In that case, rtapi would need > a new set of APIs for these tasks, implemented in kernel space with the > kernel APIs and in userspace with some kind of PCI access library. > > Jeff > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge > Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes > Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world > http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ > _______________________________________________ > Emc-developers mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
