On 9/8/26 06:17, Bertho Stultiens wrote:
On 9/8/26 11:03 AM, andy pugh wrote:
Is this discussion based on an expectation of withdrawing RTAI
support? My impression from scanning PRs has been that RTAPI support
has been expanding, with improved support for RTAI and also for
Xenomai.
Retiring RTAI would be a LinuxCNC 3.0 thing. A lot of bitrotted code
has been fixed and Xenomai got fixed too. As long as the code is
there, it must be maintained.
The driver problem is that some of these cards are ISA and I have a
hard time believing that anyone would buy a fortune swallowing modern
industrial PC to get an old card working with a /new/ LinuxCNC. Even
with the PCI cards you'd have a very hard case these days.
If you use an old PC, then you may run into the problem of memory and
speed with any modern software. So you are still limited to older
versions/distros/kernels.
Nobody would build a new system like that today. Only (desperate)
repairs of old systems that cannot be upgraded right away would ever
reuse the old stuff.
If you ever upgrade these old systems, then you'd buy a newer more
capable PC/SBC and IO board with full support. And that would fill
less space and be cheaper to boot.
And, given the modern architectures of today, would draw far less
power. My arm64 (rpi4) and monitor that's nicely running my 11x56
Sheldon, draws less than 40 watts when idle. If changing the interface
wasn't so costly, my triplet of old Dells drawing 300+ watts each would
get rebuilt to be run by a pi clone. One thing prevents that.
The heat helps heat the well insulated garage, which since all aux heat
is electric, the net gain would be offset by the increased power drawn
by the heaters.
Just to see if I could, I built a pi based backup that grabs the
/usr/home/gene directory of 5 other machines using rsymc as the engine,
With almost 12 TB of SSD raid 6 storage but not counting a small
monitor, idle power draw is 14.5 watts, deep in a backup run it hits
just under 20 watts. And it is as fast as amanda ever was.
But now I'm approaching the far end of the bathtub curve. I'm now 91
with a birthday in October.
Cheers, Gene
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