How May the LinuxCNC IRC channel be Improved?

Our primary real-time chat is in the #linuxcnc channel on irc.libera.chat. You can use web chat or connect with your own client. The chat is logged by community member Tom L. Logs can be accessed on the IRC with log for todays log or index for the calendar index.

libera.chat/

tom-itx.no-ip.biz:81/~tom-itx/irc/logs/%23linuxcnc/

Why do you avoid the IRC channel?

How may it be improved?

For me the IRC is a dog due to my timezone so I have not looked at it for many years. Nobody is online when I am,

But I just went through a week or so of the logs and  all I saw was heaps of inane off topic chats and maybe 2-3 lines of linuxcnc stuff.
I am not going to wade through all that stuff to see what is going on. (or not going on as the case may be).
It would be nice to know that developers are monitoring the forum here where the users are. I know some do.
Based on responses I have received on the Developers email list, many seem to be quite out of touch with recent operating systems and installation issues. 

If you have multiple communication channels available, you really need to monitor and respond to all of them. Thats what I do in my business.

#linuxcnc-devel is usually on topic and noise-free enough, but in general not that much is going on. IRC channel can be a "life-saver" just because of PCW who seems to be omni-present.

@rod "many seem to be quite out of touch with recent operating systems and installation issues. "

There have been lots of changes to the kernel and Debian in the past year or so. The Rpi situation is even worse. It takes lots of effort to stay on top of some of these issues. We are currently looking at why kernels since 5.15 have such lousy latency.

@Aciera If you ever get a chance to fix the forums editor it would be greatly appreciated by many.

@Bari, This illustrates exactly my point! If you followed the forum and read the email list, you would be aware that I have been chasing network latency causing error finishing reads for over 12 months. It's covered pretty well in the 2.9 version of getting linuxcnc I wrote.
Ref: linuxcnc.org/docs/2.9/html/getting-start...etting-linuxcnc.html

I have reported it upstream to Debian and the RT kernel team. It certainly predates kernel 5.15. We think maybe from 5.9. It is an issue on the original 5.10 Bullseye kernel. With the PC properly set up, CPU latency is not an issue.  You can have 1 digit jitter and still get servo-thread overruns due to network latency. This is predominately  happening on Realtek NICs where the R8169 driver is used for most. Where appropriate, using the r8168-dkms driver makes a significant improvement. Compiling a kernel from pristine upstream sources makes a massive difference (Debian must do some funky stuff). Latency has been improving with each kernel release. PCW says the 6.4 kernel is the best he's seen, I have a 6.3 kernel you can try linked in the docs above. Many users have solved latency issues by installing the DKMS driver and the 6.3 kernel, even 2 core PCS get by  happily.

I also have a pull request pending right now for a Debian bookworm installer github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc-live-build/pull/27
and there is a sticky on this forum with an ISO built from my repo under installing linuxcnc.

And I am also working on a Debian Bookworm Live installer for the raspberry pi. github.com/rodw-au/rpi-img-builder-lcnc There were some upstream issues which were resolved last night and I am presently working on adding scripts to get Linucnc from git as there are no buildbot images for it. This is a cross compiler environment so I was hoping it might end up on a buildbot  somewhere without resorting to a pi.

So yes, I know full well keeping on top of all this takes a lot of work. If you look around you might find a lot of the work is already done for you!
 

Are you using AMD Ryzen with 5.9 kernels or higher?

I'm not talking about network latency with 5.9 or higher kernels, only CPU latency.

DKMS is not used for any open source kernel modules. Well it can be but we aren't using any nvidia and similar junk.

Some serious newcomers have asked about IRC is all. And I have wondered myself why so many have disappeared from IRC over the years.

I don't use IRC because:

1. My timezone makes it difficult.
2. I find it too disjointed.