I've upgraded Ubuntu and EMC2 on the Atom 330 machine I have for controlling the lathe. The Atom 330 is a dual-core chip, but with Hyper Threading the OS can see four cores. That's not good for real-time performance, so the first thing I did was turn off HT from the BIOS. Next I did a distribution upgrade to 10.04LTS which downloaded about 1 Gig in an estimated 9 minutes (2Mb/s is OK I guess...). I then used the emc2-install script which installs the real-time kernel and emc2, and finally I edited /boot/grub/menu.lst by adding "isolcpus=1" on the kernel line. This reserves one cpu core for real-time and the other for non-real-time tasks. Without "isolcpus=1" the latency-test jitter values were easily 10k and more with a light load on the machine. With one core dedicated to real-time the jitter numbers start out at around 4k at light load and double to 7-8k under heavy load.
Here are some selected screenshots:
Next stop is getting the X and Z servos moving, as well as the hefty 2 kW spindle servo.