Recommended hardware

@PCW,

if you disable the Intel spyware (AMT).

Hmm never heard about this one. How much lower is the speed when AMT is enabled on ethernet?
Pcw, concider to design a ethercat board. That would be nice, in manhatten style has my prefix...
From what i see now is that it is the fastest protocol ever. If mesa spend some time in this protocol and build some hardware
around this, they would have the fastest i/o product on earth. I bet for sure.

Maximum servo rate with AMT enabled on a HP8300 is about ( Preempt-RT 4.18 kernel)
is about 1 KHz. This increases to about 4 KHz with AMT disabled

Not terribly interested in Ethercat since AFAIK its not possible to make a hardware slave device with open source firmware.

I know there has been a lot of discussion about licenses with this product. However:

Reviewing the Slave (SOEM) License at open Ethercat Society, I can't see there are any restrictions preventing using it for opensource projects. In fact its specifically allowed.
github.com/OpenEtherCATsociety/SOES/blob/master/LICENSE

Its just that if you make a work based on this software, you don't have to publish the derived wotk as open source

SOES is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free
Software Foundation.

SOES is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License
for more details.

As a special exception, if other files instantiate templates or use macros
or inline functions from this file, or you compile this file and link it
with other works to produce a work based on this file, this file does not
by itself cause the resulting work to be covered by the GNU General Public
License. However the source code for this file must still be made available
in accordance with section (3) of the GNU General Public License.

This exception does not invalidate any other reasons why a work based on
this file might be covered by the GNU General Public License.

To me this is designed to protect companies like Mesa from being forced to publish their IP as open source unless they want to.

It seems the default position of the Open Source movement is that becasue there is a restriction in the license it can't be included into the LinuxCNC core but in my view and I quote "This exception does not invalidate any other reasons why a work based on
this file might be covered by the GNU General Public License". In other words if you want to GPL a derived work, you can.

It does seem that the SOES now supports some devices like the LAN9252 that have data sheets that are not under NDA protection. We made a Ethercat device a couple years ago using a ET1100 that at the time had quite restrictive licenses, and truly dreadful documentation.

PCW wrote: It does seem that the SOES now supports some devices like the LAN9252 that have data sheets that are not under NDA protection. We made a Ethercat device a couple years ago using a ET1100 that at the time had quite restrictive licenses, and truly dreadful documentation.

I'm sure mesa supporters will eagerly await V2 Ethercat seems to be gathering a head of steam in commercial systems

@PCW,

Currently i am writing a Etercat c code glue model. I have the i/o working on the etherlab side on 64 bit Linux. The glue to
Linuxcnc is now i am working on. It's hard to work with 3 different c complilers. So i have a plan.
I think you might be able to test it on a already existing mesa fpga board. Only thing would be to write a hotmost3 glue model
for mesa ethercat electronics.

My opinion is to write a universal glue module for Linuxcnc to exernal c program application's, Now i have the idea it looks like importing 2 separate bitfiles in the glue model. I call it bitfiles now, but it are in fact c information files.

@Rodw,

I think ethercat is a nice product. But it's hard to setup for future Linuxcnc generation's. Everyone know it wil be 64 bit system's
or higher. Now It only run's on a old Linuxcnc 32 bit version.
Maybe Sascha can make an update to the .so file for 64 bit kernels. The source code of Sascha's kernel driver is so far i know only available as package inluded an .so file. Then there was a patch that i did not understand how to install.
Then i started from scratch.