Linuxcnc + LFS + BLFS

Hi Guys,

Not too sure if this the right spot for this question.

So far I've managed to do a Linux From Scratch & Beyond Linux From install, chose RTAI-4.1.1 & a 3.13.33 kernel.
plain vanilla kernel install went ok, install Linuxcnc simulator ok. Ran a few tests of axis and all appeared to go ok.

Patched the kernel for RTAI, built the new kernel, rebooted and all went well, installed the RTAI modules, that again went ok.

Now to Linuxcnc 2.7

Using version 2.7.4, found I had to make a change to rtai_rtapi.c

From
To
Then the next step was to replace the whitelist section in module_helper.c (2.7.4) from the whitelist in the 2.6 branch, this was need to be able to load rtai_shm .

So far so good, can run the latency test and a quick run of axis, not connected my mill as of yet. All required modules load and unload as required...after a few tweaks to rtai.conf.

The big question I have is, does anyone have an opinion or knowledge whether these changes will have any affect to the operation of linuxcnc...or do I need to start doing some testing connected to some hardware ?

I did try building a 2.6 branch built configure complained about no version.h .

Thanks for your time
Cheers Rob

Had some time to kill, was interested in giving it a go. I've taken a bit out of the kernel, like sound, that I don't think is required to run a cnc machine.

Actually wasn't all that hard, have a bunch of scripts to build all the required packages I needed/wanted (I saved the tools dir from previous builds). So far I'm using about 4404MB and this includes 1858MB for a couple of extracted Linux trees (and tarballs) and RTAI sources in /usr/src & 524MB of sources for the BLFS portion of the build, removing firefox would save about another 155MB.

But yes I guess it's some time for some real world testing, biggest issue ATM is the latency spiking when loading firefox for the first time, if I close firfox, reset the latency timer and restart Firefox everything stays within spec for software step generation. This is with a very old PATA drive, thinking of getting my hands on a SATA driver and seeing how that goes. BTW the machine is a SFF HP\Compaq d530, with 1GB ram and a NV agp card.

I know there's a good chance I'm barking up the wrong tree and may fail.

Not thouroghly and not with a recent release. Which is something that I really should endeavour to do.

Installed wheezy linuxcnc.....not really a fan of Debian to begin with, more of a Slackware kind of guy.

No matter what distro or what kind of driver, SATA or PATA, still get a spike to 50k when opening FF for first time, reset the statistics and open FF again all is good.

ATM moment I have LXterminal running with 4 tabs, one running the latency test and the other three each running glxgears, Servo thread max jitter is about 8500 and Base thread is about 9700.

I'll let it run for a bit longer and report back, btw I'm just using a window manager, ICEwm and no desktop manager, so no shortcuts on the desktop.

I'll install JWM and give that a whirl.

I only see the spike when opening firefox, not something I'd do whilst running the Mill.

OK Rob enough talk, time to do some testing with something hooked up.