MESA board selection to replace ESS

JT,
Thanks for the input on Debian 10 and 2.8...Have you tried Deb10 yet?

Roger that on the base thread when using Mesa cards with their onboard processing, and special thanks on the latency-histogram --nobase...will make note of that and use it whenever I do a parallel port again, if ever...

I should have got a 7i76e from you when we built my brother's plasma table, we ordered a 5i25 and 7i76 from you instead, as I remember...

Thanks again JT for your input
Mike

JT,
Well here is the latest: PJ picked up a used Dell Optiplex 3010 computer...From running the latency-histogram, and if I am reading the graph correctly it appears to have a low servo thread latency...We are running Stretch with 2.8.1 right now...Hope to be testing on the machine this weekend...In hopes that the previous computer was just unable to provide and meet the needs to communicate with hm2_eth due to the extremely high latency, this computer should cure that specific problem

UPDATE: This weekend we tested computer communications with the 7i76e board and achieved success...Here are the findings...I pulled the HDD out of the computer that it was in and put it in two other computers in which the BIOS was customized to conform to best latency condition...No change!
I had a few other HDD's around that already had LCNC installed with 2.7.15, and 2.8.0 on them...They qualified on the two other computers I was using for testing...My friend came up with another computer which we put into the mix of available computers for test puposes...This last computer qualified the best for the further testing, but that HDD just would not run on any of them...So I re-installed LCNC on the HDD and voila!...There was nothing wrong with the HDD, just something in the kernel that none of those computers liked for unknown reasons...
Problem: Unable to make connection between computer and 7i76e board...This was due to extremely high latency...
Solution: In this case it appears as though the extremely high latency was due to something in or about the kernel, so re-installed O/S which resolved the situation...
So, all working well now...have stable comm with hm2_eth driver and we will now be able to move forward from here...I am going to make another posting in here, for some guidance, example setups, ini and hal file examples from a some of the folks that have set up one of these Avid machines with LCNC using the Mesa board...
Thanks to all for your input and guidance...
Mike

Bevins,
Could I impose upon you to post your configuration files, ini and hal, in order that we can use as a guide in our setup on this Avid machine...May save us some time...

Thanks in advance
MIke