Ethercat random jitter fix

This is great news. There has been a lot of ethercat related development activity driven by grandixximo on both Linuxcnc and the linuxcnc-ethercat hal driver. When a few more things come together, I will be refreshing my ISO's which will put everything on the one ISO. 

Its great that Grandixximo is now the owner of the  linuxcnc-ethercat repository and he's implemented a number of changes with more in the pipleine. He's also got a PR with LinuxCNC that will provide a "hook" in linuxCNC to allow synchronizing the servo thread with Ethercat before the servo thread starts which should further improve results and perhaps remove that little squeak even..

Thank you for your endorsement of my kernel tuning optimizations. Its very valuable feedback being able to state Trixie (Ddebian 13) is as good as Debian 10 once tuned. Having a system that queries your PC as it is optimised has reduced manually tuned jitter by 50% in my testing. I have never been very rigorous about this testing as it needs to be installed on hardware  and I have to stuff around compiling a wifi driver every times so its easy to loose data but it seems to improve with every iteration as its given me a place to record every new optimisation I unearth.

At risk of upsetting some, you can find out more about my optimisations on my Youtube channel www.youtube.com/@MrRodW or the companion website mrrodw.au/ 

Thank you very much for all your hard work. I’ve been following this thread the whole time, and now that the changes are being incorporated into the official repository, I’ll update my repositories and test the new EtherCAT HAL driver.Note 1:From what I’ve read, there does appear to be a dependency between the software and hardware.Note 2:I would ask you to investigate whether Debian, the base thread and the servo thread can each be assigned to a single CPU core.This would further improve stability.This is also done by Beckhoff and Codesys.It makes their runtime independent of the operating system and guarantees real-time capability. 

andrax wrote:

Note 2:I would ask you to investigate whether Debian, the base thread and the servo thread can each be assigned to a single CPU core.This would further improve stability.This is also done by Beckhoff and Codesys.It makes their runtime independent of the operating system and guarantees real-time capability. 

Yes, I believe this is the correct approach but I've never run a base thread or looked at the thread instantiation code in detail.
With a single isolated core (normal case) both threads should end up there.

Ethercat and Mesa configs should not need a base thread

There is no need for base-thread on ethercat machines
base-thread should be set to 0, which will disable it, you can hook up everything to servo-thread, also the "no floating point" situation is completely stripped out form 2.10 master, and disabled on next 2.9 release, 2.9.9 whenever that ships...

Hi,

I installed and tested the new driver.
The installation went smoothly, and the driver is working.
I’ll be testing it thoroughly over the next few days.
I can’t comment on the jitter or synchronization issues, as I haven’t experienced any problems in that regard.
Nevertheless, I’d like to provide some feedback.

Great work