Greetings long lost LFS'ers!
It has been many years since my last build so I am very excited to
embark on a build of LFS 7.8 on my new server. Hopefully it will be
mostly smooth sailing, but of course it wouldn't be fun if I didn't
run into a few head-scratching problems along the way!
Even though it's been 15 years since I first discovered this wonderful
project, this will only be my third "substantial" attempt at building
an LFS system. My first build occurred way back in the Spring of
2001, and was based on version 2.4.3 of the book. I finished all of
LFS and a good chunk of BLFS as well. I used that machine as my
primary desktop system for about a year, after which it continued its
usefulness by running my website and mail server for another 2 years.
I named the server "hagrid" (Harry Potter was big at the time ;) For
historical laughs, here's the hardware the build was running on:
Asus P2B Motherboard
Intel Pentium 2 - 400MHz
128 MB PC100 SDRAM
Matrox Millenium G200 AGP w/8MB VRAM
DEC 21041 Tulip 10Mbps NIC
Primary Master: 8.0 GB WD Caviar #38400
Primary Slave: 20.0 GB WDC200BB-00AUA1
The 2.4.3 LFS build included gcc 2.95.2, glibc 2.1.3, and kernel 2.4.4.
And for comparison, here's what my new server is based on:
Supermicro X11SSH-F with Intel C236 chipset
Intel Xeon E3-1220 V5
64 GB DDR4-2133 ECC
200 GB Intel SSD
2x 4TB WD RE WD4000FYYZ
I now have more than twice as much RAM as I used to have disk space!
In preparation for this endeavor, I've skimmed through the whole book
to see if there have been any dramatic changes since the last time
around. Version numbers have certainly changed, but the basic process
is very familiar. One issue that came up in the olden days was subtle
host-system toolchain dependencies bleeding into the LFS system
binaries. It looks like a lot of work has gone into making the
toolchain construction more robust, so I don't think that will be an
issue anymore.
I've completed the system burn-in procedures[1] and installed CentOS
7.2 as the host OS. I will probably follow the book very closely at
least up to BLFS, although I will probably stick with xfs instead of
ext4 for the filesystems.
I'll send along any issues I run into, but given time constraints this
project is only allocated a small time slice :) So it may take a few
weeks before I get to a fully functioning system.
Cheers!
czep
[1] If interested, here are the 3 essential burn-in steps I use to
validate new hardware:
1) memtest86 - run it overnight to get a few passes.
2) smartmontools - this involves 4 tests: short, conveyance,
badblocks, and long:
smartctl -t short /dev/sdX
smartctl -t conveyance /dev/sdX
badblocks -ws /dev/sdX
smartctl -t long /dev/sdX
Review results with: smartctl --all /dev/sdX
Note: DO NOT run the badblocks test on an SSD
3) prime95 - run for a few hours and make sure nothing catches on fire!
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