Hi NTULINUX,
I finally had the chance to try out your Gentoo-based LinuxCNC distro on my N100 system — thanks for putting it together!
At first, I was a bit surprised (and honestly a little disappointed) because the initial latency results were significantly worse compared to my Debian 13 / KDE setup. I even posted my findings yesterday to share what I saw. However, after digging a bit deeper today, I discovered that when I installed your Gentoo distro onto a new NVMe drive, the BIOS settings had somehow been reset to defaults. That definitely explained the poor initial performance!
Once I re-applied the correct BIOS settings, the latency results improved considerably. While it's still not quite as good as what I get with my Debian 13 setup, it's much closer now. This seems to reinforce just how well LinuxCNC performs on Debian 13 — especially considering that my Debian system has full driver support, including for sound, whereas your Gentoo distro doesn’t include those drivers by default. When I disable the sound drivers on Debian, I get even lower latency, though honestly the out-of-the-box performance is already excellent, so no need to disable them.
I also noticed one strange behavior on Gentoo: although the Latency Histogram window is otherwise responsive, the graph and Elapsed Time sometimes appear to freeze and stop updating. Pressing the Reset button restarts the process, which confirms that the application itself isn't hanging — just the display updates seem to stop intermittently.
Below are the latency graphs for both systems after running for 30 minutes under the same conditions:
- 5x glxgears
- Heavy internet browsing with YouTube videos playing
- System stress via:
Code:
$ stress-ng --cpu 4 --iomix 2 --vm 1 --vm-bytes 1G --timeout 2000s --metrics-brief
Thanks again for your work on the Gentoo distro — curious to hear your thoughts!
