Hey there Just wanted to share some findings after combining all sorts of "good practices" for getting a decent MachineKit setup. The machine is dated and uses a CPU than can be bought for less than a dollar I think.
The TL;DR is: Servo thread at 15052 Base thread at 12569 Details: OS: Debian Jessie with a Xenomai kernel upgraded from a LinuxCNC Wheezy system Hardware: Dell Optiplex 745 Bios: Almost everything turned off except USB, parallel port, ethernet and CPU thermal protection Hardware details: cnc@TC3020:~$ lspci00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82Q963/Q965 Memory Controller Hub (rev 02)00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82Q963/Q965 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02)00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation 82Q963/Q965 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02)00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02)00:1a.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 02)00:1a.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02)00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 5 (rev 02)00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)00:1d.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)00:1d.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02)00:1d.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev f2)00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801HB/HR (ICH8/R) LPC Interface Controller (rev 02)00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) 4 port SATA Controller [IDE mode] (rev 02)00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)00:1f.5 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801HR/HO/HH (ICH8R/DO/DH) 2 port SATA Controller [IDE mode] (rev 02)02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5754 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02) cnc@TC3020:~$ lscpu Architecture: i686CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bitByte Order: Little EndianCPU(s): 2On-line CPU(s) list: 0,1Thread(s) per core: 1Core(s) per socket: 2Socket(s): 1Vendor ID: GenuineIntelCPU family: 6Model: 15Model name: Intel(R) Pentium(R) Dual CPU E2200 @ 2.20GHzStepping: 13CPU MHz: 2192.790BogoMIPS: 4385.58L1d cache: 32KL1i cache: 32KL2 cache: 1024K Grub details: cnc@TC3020:~$ dmesg | grep command[ 0.000000] Kernel command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-3.8-1-xenomai.x86-686-pae root=UUID=63401999-b871-430d-9566-de89b087ffef ro initrd=/install/initrd.gz quiet rootdelay=5 xeno_hal.smi=1 lapic=notscdeadline hpet=disable i915.i915_enable_rc6=0 i915.powersave=0 intel_idle.max_cstate=1 processor.max_cstate=1 isolcpus=1 idle=poll acpi_irq_nobalance noirqbalance cnc@TC3020:~$ cat /proc/interrupts CPU0 CPU1 0: 72 0 IO-APIC-edge timer 1: 3 0 IO-APIC-edge i8042 7: 0 0 IO-APIC-edge parport0 8: 0 0 IO-APIC-edge rtc0 9: 0 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi acpi 12: 4 0 IO-APIC-edge i8042 16: 100272 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi uhci_hcd:usb3, i915, eth0 17: 56226 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi uhci_hcd:usb4, uhci_hcd:usb6 18: 0 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi uhci_hcd:usb7 20: 28260 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi ata_piix, ata_piix, i801_smbus 22: 3 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi ehci_hcd:usb1 23: 0 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi ehci_hcd:usb2, uhci_hcd:usb5NMI: 2861 2861 Non-maskable interruptsLOC: 1377714 350753 Local timer interruptsSPU: 0 0 Spurious interruptsPMI: 2861 2861 Performance monitoring interruptsIWI: 0 0 IRQ work interruptsRTR: 0 0 APIC ICR read retriesRES: 2 2 Rescheduling interruptsCAL: 0 347 Function call interruptsTLB: 0 1 TLB shootdownsTRM: 0 0 Thermal event interruptsTHR: 0 0 Threshold APIC interruptsMCE: 0 0 Machine check exceptionsMCP: 9 9 Machine check pollsERR: 0MIS: 0 For the "stress test" itself, I ran 5 glxgears and played repeatedly a video stream and the latency was not affected at all after 30 minutes. Here's the evidence: http://i.imgur.com/OnYcAXn.png That system is driving a 3.2x2.1m CNC router through the parallel port with the gantry component (adapted from the Probotix BBB one) for auto-squaring, debouncers for the limit switches, sindle control using PDM (worked best for us). Steppers are set to 1/16 and I can get rapids as high as 7.2m/min though the machine will fall apart since the ballscrews will start jumping up and down so we're keeping it at 4m/min which is great. Later today we're going to upgrade the CPU for a Core 2 Duo quad and we may have different figures. We'll see. Anyways, I'm pretty happy with this. Ask me anything about OS or hardware and I'll be happy to share. -Fernando -- website: http://www.machinekit.io blog: http://blog.machinekit.io github: https://github.com/machinekit --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Machinekit" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to machinekit+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/machinekit. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.