LinuxCNC on Raspberry Pi 5

I finally feel like my basic Pi5 (NVME boot) / Mesa 7i95T system is basically functional.

I used Rob's link to what I think is his Google Drive to get what I believe is a LinuxCNC 2.9.3 / Kernel 6.6 RT ISO.

Because of being new or very rusty on virtually every level, I wound up stumbling my way through that process relying on the gracious help from the community.

I will attach a number of files for anyone to glance at or comment on if they wish.

Since I know now that there are many choices I should do differently I ordered an inventory of NVME and SD cards to start over clean and also try out other combinations of options without abandoning what I have.

I have a few questions before I start over 'clean':

1) Is the Pi5 2.9.3 ISO that I downloaded (or a newer one) now attached to the link on the Downloads page or is the one I downloaded still the latest?

2) I installed NetworkManager because I was struggling getting my WiFi working for internet access while dedicating the cable Ethernet to the Mesa board. Would it be better for me to avoid NetworkManager this time around?

3) I installed the Raspberry KVM because I thought that it might be useful sometimes, but I have never really used it so far. I'm wondering if there might be some latency implications to its presence or use?

I also included a screen capture for the latency histogram if anyone is curious.

Thanks

I read your post and it took a while to sink in how well running the native RaspianOS with the 6.12 kernel for what I want to accomplish.  I'm guessing that 6.12+ might be a real game changer across the board but I remember discussions about certain run-time flags being used to determine if PREEMPT_RT was part of the build and people commented that some don't match up yet.

Do you think that might be a hurdle in the short / mid  term?

Do you think someone familiar with the run-time testing code might already be working on a fix to any of those problems?

Stop overthinking.
With mesa hardware you don't need a base thread, only a servo thread is required. With that, latency isn't such a huge issue either. Trying to get an extra bit here and there does nothing.
The pre made image Rodw recently linked to is perfectly fine to run a machine, the only exception would be if you are using the RPi 5 spi interface to talk to a 7c81 or 7c80 as this requires a driver that isn't included in Rods image , this is not required for ethernet.
Invest more into learning the ins and outs of hal . This is more important that fussing over software as the images provide what is required, remember the only task these images are meant for is running a CNC machine.
If one reads the online docs one will fine some simple exercises that do not require a CNC machine.

I've had good luck getting everything to run well enough to get deep into learning and configuring LinuxCNC, Mesa 7i95T and the needed .ini and HAL files.  However, I just ran into my first problem when LinuxCNC errors on start when I configure QtDragon as the interfaces. 

I've already worked my way through several prior fail-on-start situations chasing down reported errors from the usual sources but this one is stumping me because I can't seem to find the actual error in the outputs I'm aware of.I will attach everything I can think of if someone could take a peak and spot what I'm missing.

Thanks

try
DISPLAY = qtvcp qtdragon

WooHoo - It started right up!

Thanks a bunch.