I know I'm not on the dev team but my take on this is that you have no choice but to release 2.8 without RTAI. It appears there are no prospects to resolve the situation which has clearly been an issue since Wheezy went EOL over two years ago. By withholding the release of V 2.8 for such an obscene amount of time, you are hurting the future of this amazing software project. There are so many great features in 2.8 and I hazard a guess there has never been a release candidate of any software in the history of Linux that has had so much user testing.
This is not a unique situation, and its happened to many software projects in the past particularly where hardware interfaces are involved, In fact, I had a software program in this boat and I was unable to purchase any hardware in Australia to use as a backstop in our production environment. The software upgrade was $25k and I had only paid $10k for the complete hardware and software system. I resorted to buying a PC with the right CPU second hand from the USA to have up my sleeve. Fortunately, its not going to cost users anywhere near the $25k I faced to upgrade their hardware. Please bite the bullet and release 2.8 without further delay and get this project back on track. Its just too confusing to have 3 versions out there. Rod Webster *1300 896 832* +61 435 765 611 VMN® www.vmn.com.au On Tue, 9 Jun 2020 at 20:27, andy pugh <bodge...@gmail.com> wrote: > I had hoped to release 2.8 at Easter, but hit a roadblock. > > My plan was to offer both preempt-rt and RTAI ISOs for fresh installs with > Debian Buster, and packages for both realtime systems for the other > supported OSs too. > Unfortunately, despite a lot of effort on the part of Alec and a lesser > amount by myself we have not managed to make the RTAI system exit cleanly > under all circumstances. > > Specifically a script that starts realtime, loads an instance of the abs > component and then exists will cause a kernel lock up after hundreds to > thousands of cycles. > Unfortunately this means that runtests will frequently crash the buildbot, > so is a more serious problem than it might seem. > > As far as I know the system is reliable and stable while actually running > LinuxCNC. > > There is a similar problem simply loading and unloading the RTAI > kernel modules (No LinuxCNC code involved), but that takes tens of > thousands of cycles (typically) to show so may be an entirely different > issue. > > Unfortunately many existing users are likely to have machines that won't > work acceptably with preempt-rt and, whilst 2.8 does run on 32-bit Wheezy + > RTAI I really would like to be offering an upgrade path to a supported OS. > > So I don't really know what to do. > > -- > atp > "A motorcycle is a bicycle with a pandemonium attachment and is designed > for the especial use of mechanical geniuses, daredevils and lunatics." > — George Fitch, Atlanta Constitution Newspaper, 1912 > > _______________________________________________ > Emc-developers mailing list > Emc-developers@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers > _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list Emc-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
