Stephen Wille Padnos wrote: > Dean Hedin wrote: > > >>I am surprized that Mach under Windows could out perform EMC in steps/sec >>since EMC is built on a realtime kernel. >> >>I presume it is therefore that it is the "quality of steps" that EMC is >>better at? In otherowrds EMC produces more accurate and precise steps. >> >> > > I haven't put Mach on a scope, so I can't comment on the "quality of steps". Mach burns a lot of CPU time to place step pulses where they need to be. it has a regular interrupt, and then checks is any steps are needed before the next interrupt. If so, it puts the CPU into a wait loop until it is time for the next step, and generates the pulse. When higher step rates are needed, it can burn up to 50%, on average, of the available CPU time just in the step generation task. So, it has the ability to time step pulses BETWEEN the regularly scheduled interrupts. This is how Art gets the higher step rates, but it is a tradeoff. I don't think it is such a good idea to play music, and especially surf the web while machining. I do, however run my Pico Systems web server, email & ftp server, etc., as well as my local network router, firewall and domain server all on an EMC distribution, and use the same machine to run EMC on hardware at my test bench. And, it handles that just fine. I don't usually play music or web surf on it, but I do get on the web when doing software updates. Running stepper or servo systems with a little hardware boost greatly reduces the load on the CPU. I had a customer's old system in for some upgrades, and found that a 400 MHz Pentium II is definitely getting to be the minimum performance for a Ubuntu 6.06-based EMC2 system.
Jon ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
