A strange RTAPI at startup problem

hi,

just to begin with i am a total noob on linux...

I recently got an old pc for use with my mill, the system is made up as follows:

motherboard: A7N8X-E
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 3000+ (at 2.1ghz)
ram 1G+512+128

hdd maxtor 160g SATA / IBM 40G IDE

AGP Geforce FX5500 (propietary drivers not loaded)
PCI Moschip 9865 dual parallel card (& a cheap chinese pci to parallel card branded hexin which i'm not using)
PCI cnet cwp-854 wireless network card


latencies are good at around 7msec UNLESS i run something which requires administrative tasks (such as update manager). When the password window appears it shoots up to 50msec. if I close and re-open and check again the latency stays at 7msec.

problems began when I installed the maxtor sata hdd. After lots of testing I found that disabling the secondary (PCI slot) parallel port solves the rtapi problem. Latency tests are still good with the SATA HDD, also tested the realtime subsytem and got no overruns. I tried moving the parallel card, and also tested the cheap chinese card with the same results.

(after testing every bios setting and possible configurations) I then switched to the IBM IDE drive and the problem was solved, I configured the second and third port and had absolutely no problems.

before I buy another IDE drive (the one I have has bad sectors), is there any way I can get the system to work with the SATA drive?

I tried following the instructions towards disabling SMI (which is probably useless since i have no realtime kernel overruns) but after following this video: I get an error during startup which says its failing to load the .ko file

yes i had a backup of the conf file.

im sure i have no errors, i just tried again copying and pasting, here is my rtapi.conf:

# List of realtime kernel modules to be loaded
if [ "3" = "3" ] ; then \
MODULES="adeos rtai_hal rtai_ksched rtai_fifos rtai_shm rtai_sem rtai_math rtai_smi"
RTAI=3
MODPATH_adeos=
MODPATH_rtai_smi=/usr/realtime-$(uname -r)/modules/rtai_smi.ko
MODPATH_rtai_hal=/usr/realtime-$(uname -r)/modules/rtai_hal.ko


and this is the error when i run emc2:

# List of realtime kernel modules to be loaded
vPrint file information:
RUN_IN_PLACE=no
EMC2_DIR=
EMC2_BIN_DIR=/usr/bin
EMC2_TCL_DIR=/usr/share/emc/tcl
EMC2_SCRIPT_DIR=
EMC2_RTLIB_DIR=/usr/realtime-2.6.32-122-rtai/modules/emc2
EMC2_CONFIG_DIR=
EMC2_LANG_DIR=/usr/share/emc/tcl/msgs
INIVAR=inivar
HALCMD=halcmd
EMC2_EMCSH=/usr/bin/wish8.5
EMC2 - 2.4.6
Machine configuration directory is '/home/stryker/emc2/configs/Stryker'
Machine configuration file is 'Stryker.ini'
INIFILE=/home/stryker/emc2/configs/Stryker/Stryker.ini
PARAMETER_FILE=emc.var
EMCMOT=motmod
EMCIO=io
TASK=milltask
HALUI=
DISPLAY=axis
NML_FILE=
Starting EMC2...
Starting EMC2 server program: emcsvr
Loading Real Time OS, RTAPI, and HAL_LIB modules
Realtime system did not load
Shutting down and cleaning up EMC2...
Killing task emcsvr, PID=2491
Removing HAL_LIB, RTAPI, and Real Time OS modules
Removing NML shared memory segments
Cleanup done

Debug file information:
insmod: error inserting '/usr/realtime-2.6.32-122-rtai/modules/rtai_smi.ko': -1 No such device
2491
PID TTY STAT TIME COMMAND
Stopping realtime threads
Unloading hal components
ERROR: Module hal_lib does not exist in /proc/modules
ERROR: Module rtapi does not exist in /proc/modules
ERROR: Module rtai_smi does not exist in /proc/modules

Kernel message information:
[ 781.295245] I-pipe: Domain RTAI registered.
[ 781.295258] RTAI[hal]: <3.8.1> mounted over IPIPE-NOTHREADS 2.6-03.
[ 781.295261] RTAI[hal]: compiled with gcc version 4.4.3 (Ubuntu 4.4.3-4ubuntu5) .
[ 781.295268] RTAI[hal]: mounted (IPIPE-NOTHREADS, IMMEDIATE (INTERNAL IRQs DISPATCHED), ISOL_CPUS_MASK: 0).
[ 781.295270] PIPELINE layers:
[ 781.295274] fc4a1e20 9ac15d93 RTAI 200
[ 781.295277] c085cb20 0 Linux 100
[ 781.323474] RTAI[malloc]: global heap size = 2097152 bytes, <BSD>.
[ 781.323672] RTAI[sched]: IMMEDIATE, MP, USER/KERNEL SPACE: <with RTAI OWN KTASKs>, kstacks pool size = 524288 bytes.
[ 781.323677] RTAI[sched]: hard timer type/freq = APIC/25056393(Hz); default timing: periodic; linear timed lists.
[ 781.323681] RTAI[sched]: Linux timer freq = 250 (Hz), TimeBase freq = 2104653000 hz.
[ 781.323684] RTAI[sched]: timer setup = 999 ns, resched latency = 2943 ns.
[ 781.323822] RTAI[usi]: enabled.
[ 781.434091] RTAI[math]: loaded.
[ 781.439395] RTAI: Intel chipset not found.
[ 781.830154] RTAI[math]: unloaded.
[ 781.905782] SCHED releases registered named ALIEN RTGLBH
[ 781.922065] RTAI[malloc]: unloaded.
[ 782.020015] RTAI[sched]: unloaded (forced hard/soft/hard transitions: traps 0, syscalls 0).
[ 782.025729] I-pipe: Domain RTAI unregistered.
[ 782.025740] RTAI[hal]: unmounted.



did I set something wrong? or didn't do something?


oh and by the way I checked /usr/realtime-2.6.32-122-rtai/modules/ and the .ko file is there

Does it EMC work properly when you revert to the original?
I do not believe there is anything to gain with the smi fix if your computer does not show a smi problem.
The smi problems I have seen are normally quite large and repeat on a regular basis.

What program did you use to edit?

note

if [ &quot;3" = "3" ] ; then \

only looks wrong on the forum page because of formatting.


Rick G

yeah i too think that the smi fix would not solve the problem, but i wanted to give it a try anyway.

yes emc does work if i remove the changes in rtapi.conf

to edit the file, in the terminal window I used sudo gedit

seeing that intel chipset error my mobo has nvidia chipset, is the smi fix exclusively used on motherboards based on the intel cipset?

i guess the only way for me to work is to go to an ide hard drive (which isn't so bad after all)

meh i'm sure its some kind of conflict between the sata chipset and the parallel port card

i was trying things with the sata hard drive and i re-set the cmos, when i installed back the IDE hdd and started emc2 the rtapi error appeared again!!


I realized then that the PCI parallel card addresses had changed, i changed them in the config file and it started working again

is there some kind of way to change the addresses? the only thing I found in bios is to reserve the IRQ... the card's irq change but it doesnt solve the problem anyway

latest discovery: (this is driving me crazy)

so i installed the ide drive and disabled the sata chipset (motherboard jumper) since im not using it, formatted the ide hdd to remove the bad sectors with maxtor's utility tool...

anway after i re-installed ubuntu i was getting some horrible latency spikes, especially when trying to open firefox (for the first time after each boot)... also was getting the RTAPI error again


the solution to the problem was to turn ON the sata chipset (with the mobo jumper), even though i am using the IDE hdd....


all this doesnt make sense to me... can anyone enlighten me ?