Mesa firmware versions and updating

i why?
ii why?
iii why?
iv if you do need to:

Why would I NOT want to have the latest FW ? I'm confused as to why you would ask "why?".

Thanks for the rest of the reply

See above, right click and choose "save picture as"
It is huge...
You can use Inkscape
sudo apt install inkscape
to open Mesa PDF files and resize/clean/print as they are easily converted to SVG (scalable vector graphics).

RNZ wrote:

Hey guys, you are too fast I still trying to format the text with this diabolical editor, and you have already answered my questions !!!
 

The trick is to never edit any fancy formatted posts or you will go crazy and wish to punish whoever wrote the editor...

Yes, I have those feels right now

To be clear, I have a Raspberry Pi 5 and have been having ethernet stability issues when connecting to my 7i96s card. Thus during debugging I want to make sure I have the latest / most stable software versions installed.

Of course, latest does not equal most stable, so it would be helpful to know whether I am running version 1.0.0 or 1.0.15 if you get my drift.

RNZ wrote:

i why?
ii why?
iii why?
iv if you do need to:

Why would I NOT want to have the latest FW ? I'm confused as to why you would ask "why?".

Yeah i thought that was not the best answer as i understand why you are asking, but with Mesa there is no need to update firmware ever, changing firmware can be done based on your needs easily, i have a 7i92 and a 6i25 that i have flashed over 50 times doing all kinds of testing.
Also Mesa downloads will contain whatever firmware is available for that card, for some over 20 versions with different combos of stepgen/PWM/encoders/IO etc to choose from.
-
Just to be clear, i have no affiliation with Mesa, i used them once on a retrofit and got even specialised firmware from them in a day for exactly what i needed, from then on i exclusively use Mesa as they are extremely reliable, support is absolutely perfect as you can see above (PCW is the owner of Mesa), and by now i have over 80 Mesa boards on industrial machines in use daily, never had a single failure.

RNZ wrote:

Yes, I have those feels right now

To be clear, I have a Raspberry Pi 5 and have been having ethernet stability issues when connecting to my 7i96s card. Thus during debugging I want to make sure I have the latest / most stable software versions installed.

Of course, latest does not equal most stable, so it would be helpful to know whether I am running version 1.0.0 or 1.0.15 if you get my drift.
 

I should note that the Ethernet code has been basically unchanged for about 12 years
there have been minor tweaks and bug fixes (the latest change (to V18) fixed a bug in
the user LED options in V17) but none have changed basic Ethernet communications.