First of all, I would like to thank you all for your comments. I hope many more will follow. Please allow me to reflect a bit on your comments and add some additional thoughts.
@NTULINUX: I am not very familiar with Gentoo, but I am certainly curios to see how well Gentoo performs compared to my daily driver LinuxMint 22 with KDE and my new Clear Linux system, which I installed out of curiosity and for evaluation purposes only. It has been a long time since I played around with Gentoo, and back then it was quite a struggle to get things up and running the way I wanted. But that probably applied to most distros back then. Things have changed a lot the past decades... As for Clear Linux, I have seen some recent benchmarks that gave me the impression that the CL team has really achieved substantially better performance compared to most other distros and I am very curious to see if that would also be the case with LinuxCNC running on CL. And yes, I know that perceived user experience and latency are very different things, so let's put it to the test.
@cornholio: I'm not sure what made you think my post was AI generated, but it is not. For now I will just take it as a compliment, as English is not my native language, so seemingly I am doing quite well
On the other hand, your remark about "the term intelligence being used very loosely" feels a bit insulting. I hope that is just my poor interpretation and not your intention.
As for the security aspect of CL, I don't care too much about that and I agree with you that the best approach is to keep machine controllers disconnected from general networks. I am primarily interested in the potential suitability of CL from a real time performance / latency perspective. And I don't know if it will be suitable or any better than others, but I am curious....
To all: I am aware that there is a tendency on this forum to be negative about Intel and AMD, and from a CNC latency perspective that is quite understandable and I share many of the frustrations that have been expressed. Newer hardware comes with many more bells and whistles that none of us CNC guys really need. My good old J1900 Mini-ITX boards (GA-J1900N-D3V to be precise) still give me excellent low latency results, and definitely much better than the most recent platforms, but lets face it.... older hardware will eventually phase out and we will have to work with what is available. For most of us that means that using newer Intel and AMD platforms will become inevitable. I have a plethora of computers that I use for my daily work, including a M2 MacBook Pro, some ARM based SBCs and obviously Intel and AMD devices as well, and none of those platforms is perfect. So let's stop bashing certain processor brands, stop pretending that "everything used to be better when I was young" and instead make today's reality work for us as good as possible. Let's also keep in mind that what we are doing with LinuxCNC is trying make general purpose CPUs operate as MCUs, which they are not. So let us not put the blame on Intel and AMD for that. And if one day the newest processors cannot give us the required real time performance that we need, perhaps we may have to move completely away from using general purpose CPUs to do timing critical tasks, which is basically what Mesa cards and similar products are doing for us too. Personally, my ideal system would be an SBC with both A-Cortex application processor cores and M-Cortex MCU cores, so we can move all timing critical tasks to the M cores (which are built for that purpose), and have the general stuff run on the A cores. Then we would create a synergy between processors and software as intended for industrial applications, but that would require a partial redesign of LinuxCNC. Perhaps one day....
Back to Clear Linux and my motivation to bring it up on this forum: When I first learned about Clear Linux I was just as skeptical as most, for obvious reasons. And perhaps Debian, Gentoo or other distros (like CachyOS) may be able to perform just as good. I don't know, but I am curious, so let's find out. My thoughts are that perhaps with the inside knowledge of the Intel team we may be able to turn modern processor platforms into better performing systems for us. So in order to challenge that, and hopefully see some great results, I submitted a package-request. In the worst case situation the CL team will not be able to create a package at all or only create a system that does not perform any better than what we already have. But at least then we know..... Thus far I must say the Clear Linux team seems dedicated to make it work. As a side note: they seem to use the open source Meson Build System, which itself is already interesting and perhaps worth to consider for future LinuxCNC developments, as it can resolve dependencies for different platforms in a much easier way than building software the traditional way. It would provide us with a true cross platform build system and make us less depending on Debian as the preferred distro.
Anyway.... Fingers crossed and let's see....... And if LinuxCNC on Clear Linux does stand out, then we may be able to benefit from that even for those who do not want to use CL. After all, Clear Linux is open source, so anybody who wants to use their performance improvements and implement it in their own preferred distro is totally free to do so. Whatever the outcome may be, personally I think it may be interesting.
