Linux stuck with blinking cursor

FedX wrote:

Ok I'll give it a try.
On my computer now with Mate and the 5.8 kernel i have a ridiculously high jitter of 12900ms base thread. How is that even possible with this powerful hardware?

Are you running a real time kernel?

what does

uname -a

report

Also if you are running a real time kernel, do you have all power saving and speed switching options disabled in the BIOS?

Hi,
Ok good hint, i installed the generic kernel yesterday..
I installed the low latency 5.8.0 Kernel now and also tested it. Base thread jitter is better with it but still high nearly ~8000ms. Servo thread: ~7900ms
uname -a:
5.8.0-050800-lowlatency #202008022230 SMP PREEMPT Sun Aug 2 22:36:20 UTC 2020 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Everything regarding power saving is disabled in bios.
I also tried to install the newest Ubuntu AMD driver from Amd homepage for my rx5700xt, but the system was not booting afterwards and i had to deinstall it.

There seems no hostmot2 driver installed. All i can find on how to install it is the package manager. But i cannot find it, i think i dont have the correct source. The only source i inserted is deb buildbot.linuxcnc.ord/stretch 2.8-rtpreempt/etc/apt/sources.list.d/additional-repositories.list

I dont know if its right but i downloaded the 7i92 zip from mesa hp and unzipped it to lib/firmware/hm2..

8000 ms is very good if "ms" are microseconds
8000 ms is 8 seconds is ms are milliseconds

Can you run

latency-histogram --nobase --sbinsize 2000

and post the results (screen shot) here

The hostmot2 driver is built into linuxCNC,
there is nothing else that needs to be added

Hi,
i meant us not ms sorry for the confusion. 8000ms would be a bit to much i guess

The latency test doc says that everything over 1000us is not suitable for linuxcnc at all, thats why i thougt the latency is quite high.

The Base jitter shouldn't matter as i will use a mesa card with the new system. But i think the servo thread should be stable for communicating with the mesa card via ethernet, right? Is there a limit ?

OK you are running a low-latency kernel, not a real time kernel, Sorry I didn't notice before.
If you need a very recent real time kernel. I suspect you will have to build it yourself, something like:

cd ~
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential bin86 kernel-package libqt4-dev libncurses5-dev pkg-config
mkdir rtlinux
cd rtlinux
wget www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/linux-5.10.1.tar.xz
wget www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/projects...5.10.1-rt20.patch.gz
tar -xpf linux-5.10.1.tar.xz
gunzip patch-5.10.1-rt20.patch.gz
cp patch-5.10.1-rt20.patch linux-5.10.1
cd linux-5.10.1
cat patch-5.10.1-rt20.patch | patch -p1
make xconfig
make -j16
sudo make modules_install
sudo make install


Make sure you select "Fully Preemptible Kernel" in the
"General setup" --> "Preemption Model" of Xconfig
Then do a save and exit from xconfig

Ok thanks. I think I'll try this later, even if "build yourself a real time kernel" sounds a bit frightening to me with my Linux knowledge

First of all i set everything up now, so that the new Mesa card is running with my driver board and i have a running ini and hal configuration. But while testing the watchdog bit quite often, its set to default 5000us. For testing purposes i set it to 10000us now.

I only need this second Linux machine at home to try new GUIs and stuff like that, so it's not important that it could actually run my CNC. I'm actually quite happy that Linux runs anyway with my rx5700xt..

On my CNC computer i will try Debian Buster ISO first, as this should be the most simple method for me as a Linux rookie. I hope that openGL is supported and probe_basic will run on this pc with a Radeon X1950Pro. The hardware on my CNC computer is quite old, but gave me good latency values and was able to drive 50kHz from the parport without problems. Hopefully the Buster ISO performs also as well as the Wheezy did.
The thing is, i have to drive nearly an hour to my workshop. That's why i want everything tested and set up as far as possible before trying new stuff there.

I read that for mesa use the preempt rt kernel is necessary?
I have now installed the buster iso with standard preempt rt on my actual cnc pc and the worst servo latency is 99us most of the time it's around 50us, so I think there should be no problem when using the 7i92 card.

Ok now i have the next problem.. probe basic is not starting because it says OpenGL 2.1 is needed. I checked the opengl version and get this:
now i'm confused is it a hardware or a driver problem? i updated all with apt get update/ apt get upgrade so i assume it is more a hardware problem, am i right ?
Mesa version 18.3.6 should support up to OpenGL 4.6 so my graphics card is obviously to old..

I found an old HD2900pro this definitely supports OpenGL 3.3 maybe it's still running.
..
The card is working and I installed Buster. But the system does not start up once again I have a blinking curser and j can see the mouse cursor for some seconds.. this card is so old I cannot imagine that there is no working driver in buster for it.. The live Buster from USB is running but not the installed one ?!

So after hours of testing i was not able to run a system with the HD2900pro (ATI R600). With mint its exaclty the same, i can run the live image, but after the installation the only thin i see is a blinking cursor and for a short time the mouse cursor no log in screen.. I assume that theres definetley a bug in the driver but i dont know how to handle it.

How can i see what graphic drivers are loaded from buster and mint live isos? Because this driver or firmware seems to work fine it even detects my touchscreen monitor. But as soon as i installed it nothing work..

After the whole day of testing I was finally able to run the latest version of stretch with the preempt kernel. But if I run glxgears I get system freezes..

So I gave up and ordered a cheap GeForce GT710. Hopefully the system runs stable then.