LinuxCNC on Raspberry Pi 5

You could also try installing Debian Trixie from the debian image now its available
raspi.debian.net/daily-images/

Note that this will not install a desktop, just a console but it will have a preempt_rt kernel available. I did do up a doc on doing this for Debian Bullseye which will basically be the same.

docs.google.com/document/d/1S0K-UBlXnsYC...b_0/edit?usp=sharing

The name for xfce package might have changed search the debian packages for XFCE to get the right name today.

Hello everyone,

I started to work with linuxcnc only a few weeks ago, when I decided to upgrade my 3d printer with A and B axis.
Because my pi4 was starting to jitter I acquired a pi5. As one does..

I etched the image 2.94 for pi5 to an SD card. Running this image, GPIO is not working.

halcmd loadrt hal_gpio help
Note: Using POSIX realtime
Invalid parameter `help'
<commandline>:0: waitpid failed /usr/bin/rtapi_app hal_gpio
<commandline>:0: /usr/bin/rtapi_app exited without becoming ready
<commandline>:0: insmod for hal_gpio failed, returned -1
cnc@raspberrypi:~$

I dont have the knowledge to troubleshoot this. Unfortunately. Maybe somebody here know how to solve this.

kind regards,
JAiro

Already built the Trixie image, just wanted to make sure there were no gotchas. Haven't added desktop yet, I'll do that when the base image boots from nvme drive on the Pi. Build the packages, put them up on github like before and build a full image.
Eventually this will need building once Trixie is officially released, might as well start checking if anything goes pear shaped.

I started with the most recent pull from pyavitz's repo and hoping that it's just the user script is needed to be slotted in and of course the userdata.txt I used for the Bookworm build. Oh and turn SPI on as default and just for myself as I'm probably the only one that uses midnight commander ditch the red & green defaults.

With regards to network manager, I really haven't noticed an issue with it on the RPi5 even with gnome network manager, reckon it's worth putting it in ? Another personal pref as it's easy to turn wifi on & off when needed.
Does this affect ethercat ?

Pardon me for not posting the errormessage encountered.
I was using hal_pi_gpio since I was under the impression from the forum that it is recommended for new projects.
Under "known bugs" on the man page it says:
*
At the moment (2023-07-16) this driver only seems to work on Raspbian as the generic Debian image does not set up the correct interfaces in /dev/gpiomem and restricts access to the /sys/mem interface.
*
The error message I got was related to access to /sys/mem. Since it was a known bug I did not save and post the error-message but instead tried going the Raspbian route.


I'm not sure what to make of your output from halrun but do you mean that you are successfully using GPIOs on a Rpi5 with hal_gpio and the downloaded "standard" img?
I'm not sure where I picked up that hal_pi_gpio was the way to go but if it works with hal_gpio I suppose that is the way to go. Thoughts?

The images provided are not generic Debian images, as generic Debian didn't support overlays.
The images we build are custom images based on Debian repo but with kernel sources from the RPi-Linux github.

The output I gave was showing that the hal_gpio driver does indeed work, the first line is loading the driver with the GPIO config as per the man page for the driver. Yes it was the current image, with the 6.12 series kernel & Linuxcnc 2.9.4.

hal_gpio uses a newer method that is meant to support other ARM hardware, not just the PI. Code changes at the kernel never stops!