enabling "lapic" boot option on 10.04 Live CD

I would use the uni-processor built kernel with 8.04

Sounds good - I'll give it a whirl.

Thanks,
David

Got 8.04 installed and got my Edimax EW-7811Un wireless adapter working the other day thanks to this blog entry:

random tweaks - Edimax EW-7811Un

Got some more memory coming for this machine, but starting to mess with the SMI stuff in the meantime. Ran the lspci -vv command from a terminal window and it looks like it's rev 1 of ICH7.

Most of these adapters and dongles have a Realtek chip in them it seems.
Nice to know that this one works OK

Ran the lspci -vv command from a terminal window and it looks like it's rev 1 of ICH7.

Thats what I guessed from the B suffix, hopefully the smi module will sort it.
Don't forget to turn off power management, hyperthreading etc in BIOS as well, they will all affect latency

regards

I followed steps 1-4 as described on the SMI page of the wiki, through editing /etc/emc2/rtapi.conf (I confirmed it was using that one by renaming it and LinuxCNC would not start).

wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?FixingSMIIssues

One thing I noticed when I was in that rtapi.conf file is that the "shm" module was not turned on. Should I enable that too? What does it do?

I will have to check in the BIOS and make sure all that other stuff is turned off...

One thing I noticed when I was in that rtapi.conf file is that the "shm" module was not turned on. Should I enable that too? What does it do?

rtai_shmem is part of realtime, it is not turned off, there is just not an explicit path for it, that is normal for the rtapi.conf, it does not show one for adeos either

The main thing is what is your latency like now?

I turned off hyperthreading and processor power management in the BIOS and the current latency numbers are 28,061 and 39,156 ns with two windows of glxgears running for maybe 10 minutes while futzing around on the internet. I've got a 5i25 card from Mesa Electronics that I'm going to use to talk to the Gecko G540 motor controller.