LENOVO P500

I'm starting fresh install of Debian Buster. Which of the softwares do I need and that I don't need? 

Thanks,
JuniorC 

 

Andy, I  followed the instructions in the link that you sent me. Everything went smoothly and I was able to try RTAI kernel. I'm sure if this occasionally happens, but my latency actually got worse.  This was done one the Lenovo P520, and I also try all three graphics card that i have on hand. 

The Lenovo P520 is going to be used mainly for Fusion360. The old Asus/AMD PC that I built years ago. I believe I'm going to retire it. Is the latency times a big concern if running a Mesa setup? And is the an certain PCs that have a good latency time, that an individual doesn't have to spend days of tweaking on? 

Thanks to everyone for sharing their knowledge and intelligence. 

I apologize for being on and off from time to time.  This is a project that I will finish one of these days. Some of the info is above my level. 

I've got a Lenovo S20 ThinkStation with Intel Xeon W3550, whilst great for compiling kernels, Linuxcnc and other things from source it isn't the best for latency.

I actually just pulled out an old Athlon X2 system (M4A785D-M PRO) with an AMD GPU that I had sitting around and with booting with isolcpus=1 idle=poll and messing with the max cstate the latency was very very good. Enough to run 17500 base thread with room to spare.

Thanks ALOTR, I will not give up on the old AMD just yet. I'll try again with the isolcpus, idle and max cstate. I have turned several things off in the bios. Did you make any changes to you BIOS?

Thanks again for the help 

Just the usual, turned off any power saving & audio from what I can remember.

I have another AMD board in storage, but I need to replace one of the chip coolers, but I'm expecting similar if not better results as that has a 4 core CPU.

AMD CPUS & AMD GPUs seem to give pretty good results considering the age of the system. I'm pretty the one I've been testing was a dumpster find. It's amazing what you find when you start your work before 5am in the city.

ALittleOffTheRails wrote:

I've got a Lenovo S20 ThinkStation with Intel Xeon W3550, whilst great for compiling kernels, Linuxcnc and other things from source it isn't the best for latency.
 

That is interesting as I've always wondered if upgrading to a Xeon would improve latency being a work horse, but it seems not.

Too many options on processors these days (but mostly designed for non-rt / windows)

I know where you are coming from on tge dumpster diving. The Lenovo P520 I found in the recycling bin. The other day there was several P500s.

I was hoping that the P520/Exeon was going to have a good latency. But I was disappointed, but for the price I'll use it for something else. I did disable several things in the bios, which helped. But not enough. 

I'll keep watching the recycling bin for a newer AMD.

I tend to recommend using intel cpu's for linuxcnc as there seems to have been a number of posts where amd have had bad latency and little option to improve things.

I suspect that they are designed for throughput and not strict timing (hence I thought a Xeon would be good, but it probably suffers from the same thing.... throughput, shifting data / graphics etc)

forum.linuxcnc.org/38-general-linuxcnc-q...linuxcnc-and-amd-apu

generally the kernels are a few years old
Buster + stretch is 4.19.105 (intial release Oct 2018, current updated Feb 2020 v105)
Bullseye 5.10.84 (initial release Dec 2020, updated Dec 21 v84),

hence you tend to be better with older hardware, or more specifically not the latest thing. And you are probably best with more mainstream stuff (i.e. intel, common cpu's and graphics + network cards / wifi) as issues will become apparent + fixed / patched quickly. That is at least just my viewpoint.

I've got an Wifi 6 (AX200) network card in my machine, and it's just a bit of a pain as I need to load its driver (non-free) for it to be used..... where as using a little older wifi card was not a problem. I know what the problem is + how to fix / workaround it

similar with my network ports, I have to use ethtool in order to sort the latency issues, the quick fix does not work for me, a little more work (+ time to find the issues + solutions).
forum.linuxcnc.org/39-pncconf/41540-hm2-...-rules-output#200513
walkthrough here:
forum.linuxcnc.org/38-general-linuxcnc-q...d-not-working#204478

I'd suggest posting some screenshots of your bios settings if you are still having issues as someone may be able to point to something specific.