Getting LinuxCNC updates on Debian Buster 10 RTAI

Im curious if anyone out there knows of a way to get LinuxCNC updates for a build that I can't find on BuildBot. I am running LinuxCNC 2.8 on a Debian 10 Buster RTAI kernel because it has given me the best realtime results and allowed me to use the QTVCP based screens that I have come to love. This kernel doesn't exist on BuildBot so I don't know if a way to take advantage of the updated people here are making without sacrificing latency and going for a more mainstream kernel.

I started my build with the normal Debian 10 Buster PREEMPT-RT ISO image found on the LinuxCNC website. My latency numbers with this build were too high for my liking (about 30k) so I decided to give the RTAI version a try. I hopped over to ( linuxcnc.org/docs/2.8/html/getting-start...#cha:Installing-RTAI ) and followed the steps for installing Debian RTAI and it worked like a charm. My latency is down below 5k no matter what I do to the system and I have yet to have any issues with crashing or anything else

Shortly after switching over to QTDragon, I started noticing some small issues and took to the forums to see if there was a fix. Most notably the tool table creating a work offset for every tool any time I edit any value in the table and my continuous jog rate slider being stuck at a 3600 mmpm max no matter what I did. These problems seem to now have been fixed by the community (thank you all so much!) However, there seems to be no way that I can find to actually take advantage of these fixes.

Searching through the BuildBot repositories, the only Buster repo I see is for master and is not the RTAI version anyway.

Does anyone have any recommendations on how I can get these much needed updates without having to sacrifice my realtime performance and switch to a non RTAI repo?

Thank you all in advance

Joe

Can not find anything about RTAI in the Buster dists folder, but the repo points there so i must be missing something.
Pretty sure Andy does or did some of the RTAI stuff, but did not use it lately so i am a but behind on info regarding this.

This update problem is probably related to the packaging problem reported.
The HTML docs added for qtvcp recently broke packaging of some builds.
I just reverted the commit so we will see if that fixes things.
then I'll try to find out if i can fix the doc problem.

If you got your original linuxcnc from builtbot, then when the packages update you should be able to pull then in by the distribution's regular updating procedure.

Chris

Thanks again Chris for all of your feedback.

That's the problem actually. When I followed those instructions from the LinuxCNC documentation to install the RTAI version (honestly I don't have a very firm grasp on Linux, I just followed the instructions step by step) but it does not seem to be from BuildBot at all. I'll copy and paste below the line it had me add to add the repo and maybe you can make more sense of it than me.

(echo deb linuxcnc.org/ buster base 2.8-rt | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/linuxcnc.list)

Looking through BuildBot, there doesn't seem to be a repo that is a 2.8 version of LinuxCNC that would be suited for my Debian 10 Buster RTAI kernel unless I'm missing something in the list of repos on BuildBot.

My guess is that package is not available anymore.
I'll ask on the mail list

Chris

tacklem60 wrote: Looking through BuildBot, there doesn't seem to be a repo that is a 2.8 version of LinuxCNC that would be suited for my Debian 10 Buster RTAI kernel unless I'm missing something in the list of repos on BuildBot.

The buildbot does not make an RTAI package for Buster. The reason for this is that the problems alluded to with the RTAI kernel cause the buildbot to crash when running the testsuite.

There is a package of the released version of 2.8 on the main linuxcnc repository.

tacklem60 wrote: Does anyone have any recommendations on how I can get these much needed updates without having to sacrifice my realtime performance and switch to a non RTAI repo?

I plan to make an 8.1 release fairly soon (weeks at most) incorporating the fixes in the 2.8 development branch.

That would be amazing. Thank you so much for the work you do!

Hey Andy. Just curious if there was any developments on the 8.1 release of RTAI that incorporated the fixes for the tool page in QTDragon as well as slider bar for jog velocity that we spoke about?

If so, is there a simple way for me to perform the upgrade?

Thanks again for your great work!