Re: [LAU] The future of realtime Linux

On Friday 15 November 2013 03:26:18 Ralf Mardorf did opine:

> http://lwn.net/Articles/572740/
>
This concerns the linuxcnc folks, including me.

However PREEMPT-RT isn't the only method and in fact is far from the best
to gain some high speed IO.

Paolo has finally understood that RTAI needs to be brought up to date, and
I am hearing rumors that it has even been built on a 3.10 kernel.

Alternatively the Xenomai patches are working reasonably well, ISTR I did a
test build of 3.8.3 +Xenomai on my lappy, and while it could have run a
machine, the lappy doesn't have a parport, and its cpu doesn't have even
the iron an Atom board has, so that got wiped when I put Mate 14 on it.

Right now, the "gold card" motherboard for us running machinery in real
time is from the Atom cpu camp, where latencies for a 50 kilohertz
base_thread are the usual bell curve shaped, with 99.9% of the tasks
completed within 2 u-secs of scheduled, worst case perhaps 7 u-secs when
the machine is doing something else. Like opening a new screen in firefox.
This is running that 2.6.32-122-rtai kernel we've been using since 8.04
ubuntu LTS. But thats a poor kernel for everyday use, no PAE.

From the development work going on in linuxcnc right now, its looking like
we may have found our next platform in the BeagleBone Black when a suitable
bit/pin oriented cape is shipping. This of course won't do for audio since
we do IO a bit at a time independent of any other bit in its copious IO
space. Several of them are running production milling machines right now
using homemade IO hardware. For a $45 USD cost, board about the size of a
credit card, thats amazing.

Cheers, Gene

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dangerous than 200 million guns in the hands of
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