Can the OPI5 be Configured to Run LCNC?

you could use a USB to RJ45 dongle if wifi is affecting latency.
BUt better if you could write a component to do hardware stepping driven by one of the timer interrupts

Since the switch is a no-go, I'm going to spend the extra $100 for the 7C81.

I ran the histogram overnight. Six glxgears, htop in a terminal, and youtube playing. For a while, I sat there opening and closing programs, and generally trying to create havoc. I like the result of Guglielmi's settings. isolcpus=4,5,6,7

 

That looks like a nice board for the OPI. Personally I wouldn't isolate all the big cores when you're going to use a hw step gen. isolcpus=5,7 is more than good enough and probably will give a better use experience.

I wonder where the spikes in your histogram are coming from. No (sufficient) cooling or did it run out of ram or something? Because you did see more latency while dragging windows, did you install the Mali Wayland driver and install a wayland desktop environment? (But don't install the Panfork driver, that one doesn't work with LinuxCNC).
You could see if it's throttling with "armbianmonitor -m" the C state.
You can post the interrupts after the spikes show up if you want "cat /proc/interrupts".

With a hw stepgen you don't need a base thread, you could run "latency-histogram --nobase", sometimes this makes a difference.

Very impressive numbers indeed Guglielmi with all the big cores isolated, this should give a very good performance with the software stepgen.

About the uart2, I tried to remove the ttyFIQ in the dtb but then strangely got the same result you had, it brought me to initramfs and saw it didn't recognize the nvme and sd, no idea yet why this is.

It most certainly could have been a cooling issue that caused the spikes. I left it, a bare board, running overnight, and they were there when I looked in the morning. I ordered heatsinks along with the m2 disk.

As for the user experience, even with the six glxgears and video running, it was still usable. Slow and jerky, yes. But, still usable.

I'll wait on the hardware before running more tests. For now, moving over to putting the electronics enclosure together.

Bari wrote:

Product page: www.orangepi.org/html/hardWare/computerA...ils/Orange-Pi-5.html

Rockchip RK3588
Quad-core ARM Cortex-A76 MPCore processor and quad-core ARM Cortex-A55 MPCore processor
3x Cortex-M0 MCUs integrated (stepgen)
ARM Mali-G610 MP4 GPU

Links to RK3588 info and data sheets  www.cnx-software.com/2021/12/16/rockchip...eet-sbc-coming-soon/

 

I am a bit confused about post #2 in this thread, it states that the OPi5 has a RK3358 and links a spec sheet for that chip. To the best of my knowledge the OPi5 uses a RK3358S which is a lower cost chip than the RK3358. This is the spec sheet for the RK3358S

www.cnx-software.com/2022/01/12/rockchip...x-a76-a55-processor/ 

The OPI5+ which was release a couple of days ago has the RK3358 chip (I bought one). The chips are similar but are they similar enough to use roykas guide for install and also would the GPIO driver Guglielmi is building work for this?

Yes it's the same chip, but it has a different board layout so it will need a different dtb. It also has a different Ethernet chip that will need a change in the kernel. These are the changes made by Xunlong:
github.com/orangepi-xunlong/linux-orange...aa2aa259f1bb957cbca0

I'll make a patch out of it and create a new image between now and next week. The one I've ordered is not send yet so I'm not able to test anything.

echristley wrote:

It most certainly could have been a cooling issue that caused the spikes. I left it, a bare board, running overnight, and they were there when I looked in the morning. I ordered heatsinks along with the m2 disk.

As for the user experience, even with the six glxgears and video running, it was still usable. Slow and jerky, yes. But, still usable.

I'll wait on the hardware before running more tests. For now, moving over to putting the electronics enclosure together.
 

That will most likely have been the case indeed, I did a test without any cores isolated for 2 hrs while running glxgears and running Firefox together with Chromium and still had a max latency of 30us, so that's probably how I'll run it.

I've tested 2 heat sinks, the black one covering the whole OPI and the so called Ice Tower.
The black one with 2 cores isolated and no fan it stayed cool enough with a room temp of 20 C. Without any cores isolated it'll throttle after a few minutes 100% cpu use. The cooling fan delivered with it didn't make a noticeable difference. A cooling fan in the electronics enclosure will probably be sufficient.  

The RGB fan that comes with the Ice Tower I didn't test, but with a pwm fan configured to turn on at 60c, it barely turns on without any cores isolated and normal use. 

Made an image for the OPi-5 plus if someone wants to test, please let me know if it works.

mega.nz/folder/78Z3UbRD#Pl8DdWmxLF3CDma21An8gQ

Royka,
My OPi5+ hasn't shipped out yet either, I ordered from the Ali store instead of Amazon. The usual delivery time from China is about 2-3 weeks to me on the West Coast of Canada. That being said my NanoPC-T6 from FriendlyELEC is here already, it only took about 10 days to arrive via DHL.

The post you made about xunlong kernal changes is way over my head at this point. I bought both of these SBC boards in hopes someone smarter than myself would get one an I could just follow along, you are one of the people. Thank You.

I can always use the second board for one of my many other projects that doesn't need the real-time magic. I also have 2x brand new never opened MESA 7i76e cards I bought when there was supply chain shortages. I was planning on using but will most likely never even touch them now that I picked up some LEADSHINE EL8 EtherCat drives and ELM2 motors ($ not cheap $). Each drive has its own i/o pins for limits, estop, probe, glass slides, etc. and if the OPi5+ 40-pin GPIOs are accessible than I don't see a use for the mesa cards anymore. I guess maybe I should sell them.

I guess I will need a M.2 SSD as there is no eMMC like the NanoPC-T6 has, Also I assume a heatsink will be required, is there recommended one that will work with this board?