Did a lot of testing today on a lot of PC's and a laptops regarding latency, so here are the results, have to do this as one post per computer due to attached pictures.
Prerequisite: Everything not needed for Linuxcnc is disabled in bios, including serial ports, any type of power saving, speedstep, C states, modems, virtual everything, fan control, suspend to anything, turbo, etc. ACPI is left untouched and multicore support is active as can be seen on screenshots, no isol_cpus used. Information about the processors used can be seen on the screen shots.
I will update this topic as i get my hands on more PC's.
This info is provided "as is" and as such i hold no responsibility implicit or otherwise for the results. Your results may wary, mostly due to not disabling something mentioned above in BIOS, failing HDD or controller, failing RAM modules or memory controller, overheating or failing processor fan, etc.
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Command to use for latency testing in terminal:
Code:
latency-histogram --nobase --sbinsize 1000 --show
For base and servo thread:
Code:
latency-histogram --bbinsize 1000 --sbinsize 1000 --show
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NOT usable Laptops and PC's due to very bad latency issues:
Bellow list is for laptops or PC's that are not usable for controlling a machine at all, no amount of disabling or tweaking will help as they have very aggressive power saving options that can not be disabled.
Dell Latitude E6400, E6510
Lenovo X220, T420S
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Tested Equipment and results:
Lenovo R61e:
This is with only 1Gb of RAM, Linux Mint 19.3 XCFE, kernel 4.16.12-rt5-kona-rt, single core processor at 2GHz.
Using 4.9.47-rt37-kona-rt kernel the latency is much better, and can run Linuxcnc through ethernet connected to a 7i92 for 2 days without latency issues.
Overall, a usable laptop for machine control, especially with more memory. No battery so no info if removing the power would cause latency errors.
Edit:
Using this laptop for several weeks now, no issues so far, it works nicely and does not cause latency spikes even under load.