Newbie migrating a gantry from Mach3 to LinuxCNC

There has been some work done on RTAI for stretch here. forum.linuxcnc.org/9-installing-linuxcnc...tem-with-rtai#141040

It smells a little experimentalish, and looks like it'll need a full hard drive install rather than running on the live USB, but I may give it a whirl if I'm feeling particularly ambitious (but not quite ambitious enough to replace my brake pads) tomorrow.

Somehow, though, it looks like midnight snuck up on me, so it's probably time to call it a night.

Thanks (everyone) for the help... but don't go away yet! I'm nothing if not helpless!

-Bats

Just buy one of the cheepo ssd (20-30$) and give it a try.
M5C

you can also use a sdandard Harddrive at 250GB even a 80Gb will give you a good value
its all about best to get on low money
and you can run your linuxcnc and windows on one system

Speed up through ssd of old pc is remarkable.

SSD's are so cheap this days.
Just bought one for my LinuxCNC machine yesterday for 23€ (about 25$) - 128Gb

Meh. No interest in paying or waiting for shipping when I've still got piles of old 15-20GB IDE drives lying around that'll work well enough for testing. New drives can wait until I know what works.

Although... drive speed shouldn't have an appreciable impact on latency in an RT kernel, should it?


-Bats

Hrm... I was always under the impression that - at least in the case of something like linuxcnc - the whole point of an RTOS and its hardware abstraction was to allow things like that to be (for lack of a more accurate term) prioritized out of the way of the realtimey tasks. Every discussion of latency I've run into in the docs talks about motherboard & CPU, and occasionally onboard vs discrete GPUs, but never brings up drive speed or technology as a relevant factor.

In general use, obviously any but the slowest SSD makes a world of difference over all but the fastest SATA drives, which in turn blow away the sort of decrepit old ATA/66 IDE clunkers in my spares bin, but how significant is it in real terms to linuxcnc? And is it actually likely to cause any difference in testing between the RTAI and Preempt-RT kernels?

I suppose I should probably also specify that, while the box isn't an absolutely dedicated CNC controller (it is likely to see use as a web browser during downtime), it's very much a one-task-at-a-time system. I'm not the sort who starts up a 10hr CNC job and then expects to the machine to pop open a new window to listen to some tunes, watch a bit of Netflix, play Fortnite (yikes!), or, for that matter, even opens a text editor or calculator on the same machine. That's what the machines that do have SSDs are for.


-Bats