On 4/19/20 11:12 AM, René Hopf via Emc-users wrote:
For reasons I dont understand, many people prefer to use extremely legacy hardware to run linuxcnc.
It's not a preference, it's an artifact of the situation: CNC machines have lifetimes measured in decades, while PCs go from "brand new" to "legacy" within less than one decade.
I have a Bridgeport that was made in 1983. Chris and I retrofitted it from its original controller to LinuxCNC in 2010. We used a random PC we had lying around that had decent RTAI performance - not a brand new top-of-the line one, but not anything legacy or obsolete at the time. It's got a single-core 32-bit Pentium 4 processor.
It's been happily making parts for me for a decade now. I've run every LinuxCNC release from 2.2 through 2.7 on it, and every distro from Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy through Debian Stretch. Upgrading the software is relatively easy and cheap compared to upgrading the hardware.
just for fun I tried to run it on modern hardware, and it worked really well. I used a Pentium Gold G5400 on a rog strix h370 mainboard(dual ethernet), booting from nvme. 64 bit, and efi boot, you cant legacy boot from nvme. I tried the 4.19 and 5.4.19 rt preempt kernel from the debian repo. both get extremely good latency of 1500-10000 ns, depending on bios settings and kernel args. but even the defaults are fine. I tried on a few other non-legacy PCs, and could not find a single one that doesnt work well with rt preempt.
Thanks for that data point! That's fantastic latency. Is that an over-night run, or something shorter?
-- Sebastian Kuzminsky _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
