[Etherlab-users] Embedded PC with out of the box support for igh-ethercat

Mon Nov 27 22:08:50 CET 2023

Hi Nicola,

I received a Delivery Delayed email, So you might get it eventually:

ntd at entidi.it<mailto:ntd at entidi.it>

Server at entidi.it (2a02:6b8::311) returned '400 4.4.7 Message delayed'

27/11/2023 3:10:28 AM - Server at entidi.it (2a02:6b8::311) returned '451 4.4.397 Error communicating with target host. -> 421 4.2.1 Unable to connect -> SocketError: Failed to connect. Winsock error code: 10051, Win32 error code: 10051'

Re Buildroot, our project is commercial so we can supply all open source components and configuration to any customer who requests it (no one has so far).  We do this by supplying them a firmware update that contains all of the sources and config.

However, I'm happy to share the buildroot and related config files for the CX5230 (attached).  It uses:

  *   crosstool-ng 1.25.0 (building for x86_64, config attached)
  *   Buildroot 2022.05, released June 6th, 2022
  *   Linux Kernel 4.19.266 (vanilla, no patches except the patch by RTAI)
  *   RTAI 5.3 2023-01-04 update (it needed a couple of patches, attached)
     *   https://github.com/mmorandi/RTAI/tree/main/userfiles/downloads/RTAI
  *   EtherLab master
     *   https://gitlab.com/etherlab.org/ethercat.git
     *   stable-1.5 - eb35635b778cc56e12bb7c863618d7605eaf9884
     *   GavilL's Etherlab Master unofficial patchset - 20190904
     *   https://sourceforge.net/u/uecasm/etherlab-patches/ci/default/tree/

Note: we've created our own etherlabmaster buildroot package to use Gavin's patchset.  We've also created a few more patches (attached):

  *   previous patches not picked up by Gavin:

base/0033-retry-dc-register.patch

base/0034-Overlapped-PDOs-not-fitting-into-max-datagram-size-fix.patch

base/0035-Only-read-alias-from-0x0012-reg-if-SII-alias-is-zero.patch

features/diag/0003-diag2.patch        (our version of diagnostics)

features/json-xml/0001-json-xml-tool-output.patch         (alternate output formatting)

  *   new patches:

features/sii-file/0002-rename-request-firmware-direct.patch

features/sii-file/0003-kernel-updates.patch

base/0037-replace-linux-rtmutex-with-locks.h.patch

base/0038-ccat-AV-fix-on-link-down-on-startup.patch

base/0039-ccat-poll_rx-fix-only-getting-one-frame.patch

I think there's still a bug in the IGB network driver if you want to use it as an EtherCAT master port, but it looked OK for normal networking.  (We saw a couple of patches here: https://github.com/tormach/etherlab_master/commits/master/devices/igb)

Our Linux commandline options are:

    nomodeset isolcpus=1 idle=poll tsc=reliable acpi_irq_nobalance irqaffinity=0

idle=poll was need to get the latency and jitter under control.

Regards,

Graeme.

-----Original Message-----

From: Fontana Nicola <ntd at entidi.it<mailto:ntd at entidi.it>>

Sent: Tuesday, November 28, 2023 3:04 AM

To: Luis Matos <luis.matos at agicore.pt<mailto:luis.matos at agicore.pt>>; Graeme Foot <Graeme.Foot at touchcut.com<mailto:Graeme.Foot at touchcut.com>>; etherlab-users at etherlab.org<mailto:etherlab-users at etherlab.org>

Subject: Re: [Etherlab-users] Embedded PC with out of the box support for igh-ethercat

Il giorno dom, 26/11/2023 alle 23.39 +0000, Luis Matos ha scritto:

> ...

> Às 23:14 de 26/11/2023, Graeme Foot escreveu:

> > ...

> > We build our system using Buildroot with the EtherLab EtherCAT

> > master and RTAI.  We've never used an arm based CPU, just x86 (and now x86_64).

> > ...

Many thanks for the answer, this was exactly the info I was looking for. For some reason your email never hit my mailbox, so I'm answering via Luis.

I plan to use buildroot on a headless PC as well but with plain preempt_rt. What I always fear when changing hardware is to loose weeks because you need to enable or disable some obscure flag when building the kernel.

Did you meet any issues or a vanilla kernel should just work out of the box? Sharing the buildroot config file would be awesome, but I can understand this is not always possible.

Thank you again.

--

Nicola

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