£100 1680ns machine

Hi,

New to linux cnc, just built my fist system and wanted to share my experiences and results here. After searching a bit I found people had good luck with gigabyte E350n Win8 motherboards so I bought one:
ca.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4461#ov

Cost was around £45 shipped from evil bay.
4gb ddr3 1333 (second hand) came in at £20
I had a solid state 32gb drive (ocz vertex) kicking around so threw that in
A mini atx/itx case with 300w psu cost about £30

built the thing in an hour, used linux live usb creator to pop the 10.4 iso onto a 2gb pen drive (didn't bother with a cd/dvd drive)

Straight out of the gates I got latencies of <9000 servo thread and <7500 base thread.


After some tweaks I have gotten latency down to 4322 servo and 1679 base thread. I must say this is not my work but thanks to other users on here.


List of tweaks applied:

Bios
Disabled advanced CPU core features: C6, AMD Cool and Quiet, SVM (virtualisation)
C-State left enabled

Linuxcnc 10.4
dissabled:
system - preferences - startup applications:
(check for new hardware drivers)
(bluetooth manager)
(personal file sharing)
(remote desktop)
(update notifier)
(Visual assistance)

changed update manager settings: system - administration - update manager
click update tab
uncheck all options and click close

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removed irqbalance
ubuntu software centre - installed software - search for irqbalance and remove

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enabled the isolcpus and disable irqbalancing in grub:
open applications - accessories - terminal

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

changed: GRUB CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
to: GRUB CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash isolcpus=1 acpi_irq_nobalance noirqbalance"

ctrl-o to save
ctrl-x to exit
sudo update-grub

reboot

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in the irqstuff folder (www.linuxcnc.org/index.php/english/forum...ulticore-pcs-success) here there are three files that we need to copy to the sytems folders, first we need admin rights to the root file system:

Press alt+f2 to get a run dialogue and in that type: gksu nautilus. This will open up a file browser window running as root. Copy your files across but be careful, you can nuke the system like this.

irq-affinity.conf to /etc/init
set-irq-affinity and watchirqs to /usr/local/sbin

reboot the system

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Hope that helps someone, regards