Re: How to manually install WiFi firmware on Debian Live?

[Kenneth Parker]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2021, 4:44 PM Anssi Saari  wrote:

> Kenneth Parker  writes:
>
> > That brings up a question:  Do Debian and Devuan (Debian fork without
> SystemD) use the same Kernels?
> >
> > (And I may be able to answer my own question when I get home, as I run
> both).
>
> At least the versions look similar, 4.19 in stable and 5.10 from
> backports.
>

I didn't find what I was looking for (same Kernel in Debian and Devuan,
where I could compare files) but, as Anssi found, they seem to come from
the same place.

Kenneth Parker

>

Re: How to make btrfs forget a disk?

[Victor Sudakov]

Victor Sudakov wrote:
> 
> btrfs thinks that /dev/nvme1n1 has a btrfs:
> 
> # btrfs filesystem show
> Label: none  uuid: 3414ae53-f3d4-43ea-bb88-ffefc9bc86f6
> Total devices 1 FS bytes used 1.05TiB
> devid1 size 2.00TiB used 1.33TiB path /dev/nvme0n1
> 
> Label: none  uuid: 38f74bc8-465d-4866-8ec1-3a144741012c
> Total devices 1 FS bytes used 831.16GiB
> devid1 size 3.00TiB used 1.48TiB path /dev/nvme1n1
> 
> The problem is that /dev/nvme1n1 is being used for ZFS now, and there is
> currently no btrfs thereon. However, there is a btrfs label or something
> stuck somewhere, how can I clear it?
> 
> I tried to unload/load the btrfs kernel module but it did not help. 
> It's somewhere on disk, but where?

Found some hints and recipes in
https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Problem_FAQ#How_to_clean_up_old_superblock_.3F
So the culprit probably *was* the btrfs superblock. Deloptes you were
right.

It's interesting however that "zpool create" created a GPT (which I did
not want), but did not erase a superblock from a previous filesystem.

A lesson? Always dd the first several MB of a disk with zeroes when
changing partitioning schemes, whole disk filesystems etc.

-- 
Victor Sudakov VAS4-RIPE
http://vas.tomsk.ru/
2:5005/49@fidonet


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Re: [TOTALLY OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Dan Ritter]

Andrei POPESCU wrote: 
> On Lu, 15 mar 21, 17:21:39, Dan Ritter wrote:
> > 
> > At last report: normal desktop Ryzens (nothing with a G suffix
> > unless it also has a PRO marking) 
> 
> Do you have a reliable source for the lack of ECC support in G suffix 
> processors?
> 
> And why would it work for PRO processors instead?
> 
> I think it's unlikely AMD has 2 different cores for PRO and non-PRO, 
> it's more likely it either works for both or neither.


https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/X570%20Taichi/index.asp#Specification

I'm going to omit a bunch of details:

AMD Ryzen series CPUs (Vermeer) support ...  ECC & non-ECC, un-buffered memory*
- AMD Ryzen series CPUs (Matisse) support ... ECC & non-ECC, un-buffered memory*
- AMD Ryzen series APUs (Renoir) support ... ECC & non-ECC, un-buffered memory*
- AMD Ryzen series CPUs (Pinnacle Ridge) support ... ECC & non-ECC, un-buffered 
memory*
- AMD Ryzen series CPUs (Picasso) support non-ECC, un-buffered memory*

* For Ryzen Series CPUs (Picasso), ECC is only supported with * PRO CPUs.


The first APUs are the Raven Ridge, 2200G and 2400G, which
aren't even supported on the current motherboards

The next are Picassos, 3200G and 3400G, there's an explicit
statement that only the PRO versions support ECC.

The current ones are Renoir, 4000 series, and I haven't got a
reliable source that they are ECC only on the PRO -- but I
strongly suspect it.

It's not the cores that differ between the PROs and non- -- it's
the I/O chiplet.

-dsr-

Re: xfce and hddtemp on Bullseye annoyance

[Charles Curley]

On Wed, 10 Mar 2021 11:32:20 -0700
Charles Curley  wrote:

> However, XFCE expects to find it, and complains when it doesn't. How
> do I convince XFCE not to look for it?

It seems that the XFCE sensors plugin is the culprit. I saw nothing in
the plugin's configuration about it, though.

-- 
Does anybody read signatures any more?

https://charlescurley.com
https://charlescurley.com/blog/

Re: [OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Roberto C . Sánchez]

On Tue, Mar 16, 2021 at 12:08:51AM +0200, Andrei POPESCU wrote:
> On Lu, 15 mar 21, 11:19:55, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > 
> > Last I heard Debian works on the M1 already :-), but its Emacs package
> > doesn't :-(
> 
> No surprise considering Emacs is itself a full OS :p
> 
Yeah, but it could really do with a decent text editor :-p

> (sorry, could not resist)
> 
(neither could I)

Regards,

-Roberto

-- 
Roberto C. Sánchez

Re: [EVEN MORE OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Christian Groessler]

On 3/15/21 10:47 PM, Andrei POPESCU wrote:

On Lu, 15 mar 21, 20:24:56, Sven Hartge wrote:

(I still vividly remember using memmaker and manual ordering the drivers
in config.sys and autoexec.bat to shave another 2KB from the lower
memory so the IPX driver would fit so Doom would run.)

For me it was Warcraft :)

And for some game (possibly also Warcraft) I had to pretend having a
sound card by listing the driver in config.sys, otherwise it wouldn't
even start.



For me it was "Worms".

And I was using QEMM and Quarterdeck Manifest to get maximal memory in 
the lower 640k.


regards,
chris

Re: [OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Andrei POPESCU]

On Lu, 15 mar 21, 11:19:55, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> 
> Last I heard Debian works on the M1 already :-), but its Emacs package
> doesn't :-(

No surprise considering Emacs is itself a full OS :p

(sorry, could not resist)

Kind regards,
Andrei
-- 
http://wiki.debian.org/FAQsFromDebianUser


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Re: [TOTALLY OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Andrei POPESCU]

On Lu, 15 mar 21, 17:21:39, Dan Ritter wrote:
> 
> At last report: normal desktop Ryzens (nothing with a G suffix
> unless it also has a PRO marking) 

Do you have a reliable source for the lack of ECC support in G suffix 
processors?

And why would it work for PRO processors instead?

I think it's unlikely AMD has 2 different cores for PRO and non-PRO, 
it's more likely it either works for both or neither.

Kind regards,
Andrei
-- 
http://wiki.debian.org/FAQsFromDebianUser


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Re: [EVEN MORE OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Andrei POPESCU]

On Lu, 15 mar 21, 20:24:56, Sven Hartge wrote:
> 
> (I still vividly remember using memmaker and manual ordering the drivers
> in config.sys and autoexec.bat to shave another 2KB from the lower
> memory so the IPX driver would fit so Doom would run.)

For me it was Warcraft :)

And for some game (possibly also Warcraft) I had to pretend having a 
sound card by listing the driver in config.sys, otherwise it wouldn't 
even start.

Kind regards,
Andrei
-- 
http://wiki.debian.org/FAQsFromDebianUser


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Re: Engegada aleatòria

[Jordi Miguel]

Hola,

Bé, almenys sabem que quan no funciona no s'arriba ni a executar
systemd, de manera que falla molt aviat en el procés.
El següent pas que t'aconsello es augmentar el nivell de log. Per això
hauries de tornar a editar el fitxer /etc/default/grub i posar un
"loglevel=6" a la variable GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT (recorda fer el
update-grub2 després). Si amb aquesta configuració encara no ens
ensenya res augmenta a "loglevel=7" i afegeix "debug".

Buscant per Internet he vist que hi ha força gent que ha tingut
problemes similars al teu amb els kernels 5.10, la majoria però deien
que se'ls hi arreglava amb la versió 5.10.0-4 però és precisament la
que tu fas servir i ha quedat clar que no et funciona bé.

Si ens pots donar més informació aquestes preguntes podrien ajudar:
- Tens el portàtil connectat a alguna dock station?? Si fos així, et
passa el mateix quan no està endollat a ella??
- Utilitzes un monitor extern?? Et passa el mateix quan no està
connectat el monitor extern? (o a la inversa)
- Has provat mai d'esperar a veure si acaba arrencant? de l'ordre de
deixar-lo 15-25 minuts (com més millor per descartar). En cas negatiu,
normalment quan de temps has esperat abans de forçar un reinici?


Salutacions,
Jordi
--
Para ser realmente grande, hay que estar con la gente, no por encima de ella.

--
Para ser realmente grande, hay que estar con la gente, no por encima de ella.


El lun, 15 mar 2021 a las 12:04, Joan Albert
() escribió:
>
> Hola Jordi,
>
> De nou, moltes gràcies pel teu temps.
>
> > Entenc que això és la sortida de dmesg d'una arrencada que ha funcionat
> > correctament.
>
> Efectivament, és la sortida d'una arrencada que ha funcionat
> correctament.
>
> > Amb el canvi aquest del grub el proper cop que l'ordinador no s'engegui
> > correctament la pantalla no amagarà cap missatge que s'hagi escrit, de 
> > manera
> > que espero que surti alguna cosa interessant que ens doni una pista, més 
> > enllà
> > d'aquell "Loading initial ramdisk" que ens vas posar a l'inici.
> > - Per veure el llistat d'arrencades de l'ordinador: # journalctl 
> > --list-boots
>
> El tema és que no trobo més informació d'arrencades no
> satisfactòries. He revisat el llistat d'arrencades utilitzant la comanda
> # journalctl --list-boots i només apareixen les arrencades que han
> funcionat (només apareix una del dia d'ahir, i en total devien ser 15
> intents). Tampoc apareixien més missatges a part de "Loading initial
> ramdisk", tot i canviar els paràmetres del grub i fer l'actualització.
>
> Salut,
>
> --
> Joan Albert

Re: non-existing interface problem [SOLVED, kinda]

[ghe2001]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA256

I don't know what to say.  I rebooted the box, yet again, last evening.  This 
morning, I tried yesterday's last suggestion (a big grep of dmesg), and there 
was no mention of wwan0 or eth1.  I ran the others too (dmesg (with several 
greps), ifconfig, ifup, and webmin), and nobody finds them anymore.

Thanks, list, for all your help and suggestions.  Apparently, one or more of 
them worked...  Somehow

--
Glenn English
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Version: ProtonMail

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usjuzMKRHTdxVJko0NEHeQq/jb3s33o76Ax1xoEAK9+ShDdMZli6LxUyV1K3
Pn6Vu7cIvGhNamzt5h9N2rOkIm0Kya48nk4VH+AmWOLqDU38QkrRAg==
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Re: [TOTALLY OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Dan Ritter]

Anssi Saari wrote: 
> Dan Ritter  writes:
> 
> As for the ECC support in Ryzen CPUs, as I understand it it's a bit of a
> mess. Sure the CPUs support it but if it's not validated by motherboard
> manufacturers, how do you know it actually works reliably?

... by trying it out and reporting the results to others, and
reading their results and reporting your confirmation.

This isn't a thing that the motherboard manufacturer can put in
by accident.

Anyway. If you need ECC support, you buy an EPYC server and get
registered ECC support. If you would like to have ECC as a feature, you
get a Ryzen board that's reported to work, and you get
unbuffered ECC for one-bit correction and two-bit reporting.

Then you overclock it to generate RAM errors, and it shows up in
your system log. Then you bring it back down to normal speed.

At last report: normal desktop Ryzens (nothing with a G suffix
unless it also has a PRO marking) on any ASrock, most ASUS, and
some Gigabyte motherboards will support this. To the best of my
current knowledge, no MSI motherboards.

-dsr-

Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Michael Stone]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 03:50:56PM -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:

In retrospect maybe DEC and SGI should have merged and then partnered
with AMD (as you note above some of DEC's processor design team indeed
ended up at AMD on the Opteron project), but I think it would have taken
a crapload of foresight and/or faith to do that.


Yeah, the biggest thing they lacked was faith in their own products. I 
remember being in meetings with SGI folks explaining how the future was 
going to be windows on ia64, and immediately wondering who our new 
supplier would be. The argument was always financial, but in reality the 
problem was misallocation of resources, not lack of resources. (I guess 
after billions of dollars thrown away on failed strategies the problem 
does become a lack of resources, but it didn't start out that way.) They 
would have had to become smaller and more focused, and big companies 
don't shrink easily.

Re: [TOTALLY OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Anssi Saari]

Dan Ritter  writes:

> Intel knew that their argument was bull: they owned the market
> and needed ways of subdividing their CPUs to fit every price
> point. Turning off ECC support was one of those ways.

> That strategy started with the 80486, when they brought out a
> cheap version called the 80486SX which lacked a floating point
> unit. The SX has the floating point unit, it was just turned
> off.

Initially, yes. A panic move when AMD brought out their 40 MHz 386. It
worked, got popular and later on the 486SX was manufactured separately
with a smaller die and no floating point.

As for the ECC support in Ryzen CPUs, as I understand it it's a bit of a
mess. Sure the CPUs support it but if it's not validated by motherboard
manufacturers, how do you know it actually works reliably?

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Re: How to manually install WiFi firmware on Debian Live?

[Anssi Saari]

Kenneth Parker  writes:

> That brings up a question:  Do Debian and Devuan (Debian fork without 
> SystemD) use the same Kernels? 
>
> (And I may be able to answer my own question when I get home, as I run both). 

At least the versions look similar, 4.19 in stable and 5.10 from
backports.

Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Stefan Monnier]

>>So it was a great move on the part of AMD: cheap to implement but with
>>an enormous marketing impact.
> It had much more than a marketing impact, because x86 was a PITA for more
> than 2GB of RAM and that was getting cheap and becoming a common problem by
> 2003. Switching to opteron for 8G or 16G servers was a huge win vs x86, with
> better scaling for multiprocessor configurations. (These were becoming more
> common as well, and intel was still using an old (obsolete?) flat SMP bus
> whereas AMD arrived on the scene with a far superior NUMA architecture based
> on hypertransport--designed in partnership with what was left of the old DEC
> alpha team.) It was simply the right product at the right time.

I think the performance of the Opteron would have been
sufficient to make it quite successful even if limited to 32bit.
And Microsoft took its time before releasing a version of Windows for
amd64, so most of the machines sold between 2003 and 2005 were running
in 32bit mode, AFAICT.

So I think the marketing impact of Opteron's support of the new amd64
ISA during the 2003-2005 window was more important than the technical
impact.  But you're right that 64bit support was really becoming
important right around that time: PAE was not as satisfactory a solution
(which is why AMD went ahead with amd64: the situation was becoming
untenable).

> At the time ia64 was announced alpha & MIPS processors were in some of
> the largest and most sucessful systems in the world.  With further
> development they could have remained there, but their management was
> convinced that ia64 was going to have an unbeatable performance
> advantage and that they couldn't compete with the R money intel was
> pouring in.

They could have survived a few years more, definitely.  But SGI only had
a good presence in supercomputers and computer graphics which were
pretty small markets where the CPU didn't matter that much, so it was
very costly for them to have to keep developing new top-of-the-line
processors additionally to top-of-the-line GPUs and interconnects.
They were already financially in poor health and they needed to start
designing their systems around someone else's CPU.

DEC was even worse because they didn't actually own any particular
segment of the market (besides from the VMS segment which was not
getting very many new customers) and PCs running Pentium Pros (and
successors) were taking over the workstation market.

In retrospect maybe DEC and SGI should have merged and then partnered
with AMD (as you note above some of DEC's processor design team indeed
ended up at AMD on the Opteron project), but I think it would have taken
a crapload of foresight and/or faith to do that.

[ Not sure what part HP could have played there, I wasn't very familiar
  with their products (beside drooling over the idea of a 2MB L1 cache,
  that is).  ]


Stefan

Re: [TOTALLY OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Dan Ritter]

Sven Hartge wrote: 
> Stefan Monnier  wrote:
> 
> > From a purely technical perspective, it's hard to understand how Intel
> > managed to pour so much energy into such an obviously bad idea.  The
> > only explanations seem all to be linked to market strategies.
> 
> This history repeats for Intel on several fronts:
> 
> Or the discussion about ECC for desktop devices. Intel argues "not
> needed", which is, if you follow the Rowhammer issues, not true. AMD
> just does it and it works.

Intel knew that their argument was bull: they owned the market
and needed ways of subdividing their CPUs to fit every price
point. Turning off ECC support was one of those ways.

That strategy started with the 80486, when they brought out a
cheap version called the 80486SX which lacked a floating point
unit. The SX has the floating point unit, it was just turned
off. Worse: purchasing the 80487 math coprocessor to enable
floating point support... the 487 was a full 486, that turned
off the original.

> Then there was FB-DIMM back in the 2008s. Nice idea, just, again, too
> expensive and disconnected from the market in the end.

Intel wanted more pricing points. 

> I personally am really glad that AMD got their stuff together again and
> with their ZenX-Architectures showed Intel how it is done.
> 
> What AMD now needs is a hit in the low, lower and ultra-low power
> segment.

They've got the low and lower parts now: 35W and 15W 4000-series
APUs, from the Renoir design. Stefan and I were just talking
about how you can't buy one with a normal motherboard right now
because they are entirely allocated to systems integrators. AMD
is selling 100% of production.

They don't have any 7W or lower parts, but those things aren't
very interesting compared to ARM64 architecture, where Qualcomm
and Apple and any number of smaller shops are doing great things
in the tablet and phone space.

-dsr-

Re: [TOTALLY OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Sven Hartge]

Stefan Monnier  wrote:

> From a purely technical perspective, it's hard to understand how Intel
> managed to pour so much energy into such an obviously bad idea.  The
> only explanations seem all to be linked to market strategies.

This history repeats for Intel on several fronts:

Look at the Netburst Pentium 4 desaster, which as scrapped as soon as
the Israel division showed their improved concept based on the P3, which
ran laps around the P4 while at the same time using far less power and
had a bigger yield.

Or the discussion about ECC for desktop devices. Intel argues "not
needed", which is, if you follow the Rowhammer issues, not true. AMD
just does it and it works.

Then there was FB-DIMM back in the 2008s. Nice idea, just, again, too
expensive and disconnected from the market in the end.

And all in all the rather slow improvments on the CPU fronts, the
piecemeal 5% increases sold as "big achievements" every year, while at
the same time all improvements turned out to be major security problems.

I personally am really glad that AMD got their stuff together again and
with their ZenX-Architectures showed Intel how it is done.

What AMD now needs is a hit in the low, lower and ultra-low power
segment.

Grüße,
S°

-- 
Sigmentation fault. Core dumped.

Re: [EVEN MORE OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Sven Hartge]

Joe  wrote:
> On Mon, 15 Mar 2021 12:34:42 +0100 Sven Hartge  wrote:

>> Imagine a PC with 4GB adressable memory space in 1980.

> I can. It would have cost as much as a mainframe to make full use of it.

I don't say to put it in, only to have a flat 32bit address range.

Just like the current 64bit systems don't have 16 Exabyte of memory in
them.

(I still vividly remember using memmaker and manual ordering the drivers
in config.sys and autoexec.bat to shave another 2KB from the lower
memory so the IPX driver would fit so Doom would run.)

S°

-- 
Sigmentation fault. Core dumped.

Re: [EVEN MORE OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Stefan Monnier]

>> No it wouldn't, and we had it by the late '80's with the advent of
>> 68040 abd 68060 accellerator boards for the Amiga's. But that flat
>> memory model and poor production QC doomed it.  Any program could make
>> a missfire and write into another programs memory space, crashing the
>> whole Mary Ann.
> Starting in '82 the 68010 added virtual memory and virtualization suport.

[ I can't remember any discussion of virtualization for that.
  Back then this only existed on things like IBM mainframes and noone in
  the workstation-and-lower markets cared about it, AFAIK.  ]

Note that this is only true in the sense of "wifi ready" (a laptop that
came without any wifi card but maybe with an antenna in the bezel): the
68010 was a very minor improvement of the 68000 which just fixed some
blunders that were making it (almost) impossible to provide support for
virtual memory.  You needed additional help (like an MMU) in order to
get virtual memory on the 68010 and that usually ended up very costly in
terms of performance.

Virtual memory only became vaguely usable with the 68020 (and then
actually usable on the 68030).


Stefan

Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Michael Stone]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 01:35:42PM -0400, Celejar wrote:

Apparently POWER is having a bit of a resurgence lately due to its
openness and non-x86ness:

https://www.osnews.com/story/133093/review-blackbird-secure-desktop-a-fully-open-source-modern-power9-workstation-without-any-proprietary-code/

Of course, Raptor seems to be a tiny player, and it's hard to see how
they'll get any traction since the pricing isn't very competitive,
apparently at least in part due to the chicken-and-egg market share
problem, but it's an exciting development to watch.


That doesn't do much for IBMs bottom line. :)

Re: [EVEN MORE OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 15 March 2021 12:40:51 John Hasler wrote:

> Gene writes:
> > No it wouldn't, and we had it by the late '80's with the advent of
> > 68040 abd 68060 accellerator boards for the Amiga's. But that flat
> > memory model and poor production QC doomed it.  Any program could
> > make a missfire and write into another programs memory space,
> > crashing the whole Mary Ann.
>
> Starting in '82 the 68010 added virtual memory and virtualization
> suport.

But by then the amiga design was frozen until the funeral.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
 - Louis D. Brandeis
Genes Web page 

Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[John Hasler]

I guess I misremembered.  After the merger they certainly *acted* as if
Compaq management was in charge.
-- 
John Hasler 
jhas...@newsguy.com
Elmwood, WI USA

Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Celejar]

On Mon, 15 Mar 2021 12:39:10 -0400
Michael Stone  wrote:

...

> On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 09:15:10AM +0100, Sven Hartge wrote:
> >Stefan Monnier  wrote:
> >> The IA64 architecture was a resounding success in one area tho: it
> >> killed most of the competition that was coming from "above" (at least
> >> DEC's Alpha, SGI's MIPS, HP's PA, and it likely sped up the demise of
> >> Sun's SPARC, I don't think it had much impact on POWER or PowerPC,
> >> OTOH) and thus helped open up the server (and supercomputer) market
> >> for Intel (and AMD).
> >
> >I think, IBM is big enough and old enough and established enough with
> >POWER that a "young whippersnapper" like Intel is no real danger to them
> >in their own enclosed Mainframe walled garden. I believe Apple moving
> >away from PowerPC did more damage to IBMs aspirations in that market.
> 
> IBM didn't want to just be a mainframe manufacturer, they really wanted 
> to amortize the costs for those CPUs against multiple product lines. 
> They actually made a good number of high end computing sales for a few 
> years by being the only player left standing, until amd64 just became 
> too compelling. They still have some very large deployments, but their 
> overall market share is not what they'd hoped for.

Apparently POWER is having a bit of a resurgence lately due to its
openness and non-x86ness:

https://www.osnews.com/story/133093/review-blackbird-secure-desktop-a-fully-open-source-modern-power9-workstation-without-any-proprietary-code/

Of course, Raptor seems to be a tiny player, and it's hard to see how
they'll get any traction since the pricing isn't very competitive,
apparently at least in part due to the chicken-and-egg market share
problem, but it's an exciting development to watch.

Celejar

Bug report concerning file /etc/resolv.conf and Connman

[Paweł Starzyński]

Hello,

I'm writing to you, because I don't know precisely what package is
responsible for bug- connman?, iw?,openresolv?

I've just installed Buster with mini.iso. Due to age of my PC and small
resources I tried to make my install as slim as possible.

So I went with Openbox and decided to use connman and iwd.

I've struggled a loth with getting this combo to work. I thought that the
issue is with early stage of development of iwd, but it turned out that the
situation is the same with wpasupplicant.

What was wrong? I was able to connect to only one network- the one, which I
used during installation with ethernet connection. I knew that installing
gnome-network-manager would probably solve the issue- it wasn't my first
attempt with connman, but as I've said- I tried to make my install minimal

I figured out that I'm obtaining ip, but not dns name. After some more
tries I thought of removing /etc/resolv.conf, hoping that after reboot
connman will create this file with correct setup. That happened indeed and
solved the issue, but it definitely shouldn't look like that.

I hope that my problem wasn't caused by lack of some package- I've tried to
install packages from task-lxde-desktop, to not get broken installation.

I don't know if this problem affects only Buster or maybe Bullseye too,
shortly before the release.

Regards,
Paweł Starzyński

Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Michael Stone]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 11:55:40AM -0500, John Hasler wrote:

Michael Stone writes:

...HP bought Compaq.


Compaq bought HP and then renamed themselves HP.  The name was all they
really wanted, of course.


That's a strange way to position it, since HP gave Compaq shareholders 
HP shares (leading to 36% ownership by Compaq shareholders and 64% 
ownership by HP shareholders), HP's management was in charge of the 
resulting company, HP's employees got the lion's share of retention 
bonuses, and Compaq's (DEC's) legacy products were the ones that were 
quickly killed off. The entire deal was focused on the (dead-end) PC 
businesses, and the legacy architectures of both companies weren't given 
much attention. HP eventually spun off enterprise systems into its own 
company; maybe if they'd done that with both HPs and DECs assets back in 
2002 (or if Compaq had left DEC alone) and Carly Fiorina had just kept 
the PC sales she was distracted by, the HP/DEC legacy lines could have 
done better. Or they might have still died--but they were certainly 
never going to succeed when owned by people who didn't care about them.

Re: How to manually install WiFi firmware on Debian Live?

[Kenneth Parker]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2021, 12:45 PM Anssi Saari  wrote:

> Tixy  writes:
>
> > That doesn't seem to be the standard method for the last 9 years,
> > see...
> >
> > https://lwn.net/Articles/518942/
> > https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/8/5/175
>
> Thanks.
>
> > Maybe the old ways are still enabled in Debian and used in some cases?
> > My bullseye kernel does have the kernel config enabled for user side
> > firmware loaders, I've not looked at udev.
>
> I seriously doubt that. udev is part of systemd now and it seems crazy
> Debian would maintain old code like that. With a quick look at the the
> patches Debian applies to udev there are six but none of them seem
> relevant to firmware loading.
>

That brings up a question:  Do Debian and Devuan (Debian fork without
SystemD) use the same Kernels?

(And I may be able to answer my own question when I get home, as I run
both).

Kenneth Parker

>

Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[John Hasler]

 Michael Stone writes:
> ...HP bought Compaq.

Compaq bought HP and then renamed themselves HP.  The name was all they
really wanted, of course. HP had already spun off their instrumentation
division (the real HP) as Agilent.
-- 
John Hasler 
jhas...@newsguy.com
Elmwood, WI USA

Re: How to manually install WiFi firmware on Debian Live?

[Anssi Saari]

Tixy  writes:

> That doesn't seem to be the standard method for the last 9 years,
> see...
>
> https://lwn.net/Articles/518942/
> https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/8/5/175

Thanks.

> Maybe the old ways are still enabled in Debian and used in some cases?
> My bullseye kernel does have the kernel config enabled for user side
> firmware loaders, I've not looked at udev.

I seriously doubt that. udev is part of systemd now and it seems crazy
Debian would maintain old code like that. With a quick look at the the
patches Debian applies to udev there are six but none of them seem
relevant to firmware loading.

Re: [OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Michael Stone]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 11:03:59AM -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:

From a purely technical perspective, it's hard to understand how Intel
managed to pour so much energy into such an obviously bad idea.
The only explanations seem all to be linked to market strategies.


They just had too much easy money coming in from the windows/x86 desktop 
monopoly. It took years before they really had to justify in a critical 
way the money they were spending. 

Re: [EVEN MORE OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[John Hasler]

Gene writes:
> No it wouldn't, and we had it by the late '80's with the advent of
> 68040 abd 68060 accellerator boards for the Amiga's. But that flat
> memory model and poor production QC doomed it.  Any program could make
> a missfire and write into another programs memory space, crashing the
> whole Mary Ann.

Starting in '82 the 68010 added virtual memory and virtualization suport.
-- 
John Hasler 
jhas...@newsguy.com
Elmwood, WI USA

Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Michael Stone]

On Sun, Mar 14, 2021 at 10:44:00AM -0500, John Hasler wrote:

The Wanderer wrote:

It caught on, and became so successful that Intel abandoned its ia64
approach and started making amd64 CPUs itself.


Which was unfortunate as the x86 architecture needed to die.


Moving to ia64 would have been much, much worse. Luckily it was unlikely 
to have ever happened once people got to touch actual silicon.



On Sun, Mar 14, 2021 at 02:50:10PM -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:

So it was a great move on the part of AMD: cheap to implement but with
an enormous marketing impact.


It had much more than a marketing impact, because x86 was a PITA for 
more than 2GB of RAM and that was getting cheap and becoming a common 
problem by 2003. Switching to opteron for 8G or 16G servers was a huge 
win vs x86, with better scaling for multiprocessor configurations. 
(These were becoming more common as well, and intel was still using an 
old (obsolete?) flat SMP bus whereas AMD arrived on the scene with a far 
superior NUMA architecture based on hypertransport--designed in 
partnership with what was left of the old DEC alpha team.) It was simply 
the right product at the right time.



On Sun, Mar 14, 2021 at 03:17:39PM -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:

But years passed and the i386 architecture got better and better,
including stuff like MMX, SSE and AVX was incorporated, IA64 couldn't
really keep up.


The IA64 architecture was a resounding success in one area tho: it
killed most of the competition that was coming from "above" (at least
DEC's Alpha, SGI's MIPS, HP's PA, and it likely sped up the demise of
Sun's SPARC, I don't think it had much impact on POWER or PowerPC, OTOH)
and thus helped open up the server (and supercomputer) market for Intel
(and AMD).


Yes--SGI, HP, & DEC (Compaq then HP) all preemptively killed off their 
CPU lines based on the promises made for ia64. When ia64 turned out to 
be late and the performance turned out to be disappointing, it was too 
late to revive their previous architectures and recapture the customers 
that had already abandoned ship for x86 & later amd64. It worked out 
really well for intel, and really badly for everybody else. 



On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 09:15:10AM +0100, Sven Hartge wrote:

Stefan Monnier  wrote:

The IA64 architecture was a resounding success in one area tho: it
killed most of the competition that was coming from "above" (at least
DEC's Alpha, SGI's MIPS, HP's PA, and it likely sped up the demise of
Sun's SPARC, I don't think it had much impact on POWER or PowerPC,
OTOH) and thus helped open up the server (and supercomputer) market
for Intel (and AMD).


I think, IBM is big enough and old enough and established enough with
POWER that a "young whippersnapper" like Intel is no real danger to them
in their own enclosed Mainframe walled garden. I believe Apple moving
away from PowerPC did more damage to IBMs aspirations in that market.


IBM didn't want to just be a mainframe manufacturer, they really wanted 
to amortize the costs for those CPUs against multiple product lines. 
They actually made a good number of high end computing sales for a few 
years by being the only player left standing, until amd64 just became 
too compelling. They still have some very large deployments, but their 
overall market share is not what they'd hoped for.



For the others: they where either on board from the start (like HP),
where already dead (like DEC/Compaq) or slipping into the embedded
market (like MIPS).


At the time ia64 was announced alpha & MIPS processors were in some of 
the largest and most sucessful systems in the world. With further 
development they could have remained there, but their management was 
convinced that ia64 was going to have an unbeatable performance 
advantage and that they couldn't compete with the R money intel was 
pouring in. With hindsight it's clear that neither was true but these 
decisions were made in the late 90s and intel hadn't yet run into the 
brick wall of making the compiler magic actually work. The architecture 
that was in the worst shape was PA-RISC--which is why HP had gone in 
with Intel on ia-64 in the first place. (And, of course, the alpha had 
no future once HP bought Compaq.) Also with hindsight, even if ia64 had 
been successful this strategy would have destroyed the companies because 
it was premised on the idea that even if they were all selling the same 
computers they'd somehow be able to keep their margins and lock 
customers in with proprietary OSs or some other proprietary magic. The 
industry went in a very different direction and preferred open software 
architectures, and that probably would have been true even with a 
successful ia64. HPaq & SGI bet on the wrong horse in every way.


The cloud revolution of the 2010s might have unfolded very differently 
if some of the high performance architectures from the late 90s could 
have hung on long enough for the linux convergence to offer them a way 
out of the unix wars. (Or, 

Re: [OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Dan Ritter]

Stefan Monnier wrote: 
> > There's already work in progress to port Linux mainline (and 
> > consequently Debian) to the Apple M1 :)
> 
> Since the M1 implements the ARM instruction set, I don't think there's
> much work to do here, indeed (most likely the hardest part is to fight
> Apple's opaqueness).
> 
> Last I heard Debian works on the M1 already :-), but its Emacs package
> doesn't :-(

Graphics is currently the blocker. Framebuffer works, but
getting the GPU working beyond that will probably be fun for
someone.

https://asahilinux.org/2021/03/progress-report-january-february-2021/

contains lots of useful info.

-dsr-

Re: [OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Nicholas Geovanis]

On Sun, Mar 14, 2021, 1:50 PM Stefan Monnier 
wrote:

> > Well, nearly. Itanium Merced was 2001 [1] (althoug you wouldn't buy
> > /that/ as a private person), DEC Alpha was even 1992 [2];
>
> FWIW And MIPS was there even a bit earlier with their R4000 (tho the
> software support for it only appeared some years later: they first
> wanted to have an installed base to which to deploy the software), which
> I believe was the first 64bit microprocessor.
>

And the demise of the DEC Alpha was quite unfortunate. It was super-fast
and OSF/1 was rock-solid. But DEC lost the competitive bid on that project
and Sequent/Dynix, based on hundreds of 486 CPUs, won it. Now owned by IBM
and deep-sixed: They really bought the customer base instead.

The final pedantry is that, contrary to an earlier post, the first IBM PCs
were built around the 8088, not the 8086.

IIRC the claim back then was that adding 64bit support to the R4000 was
> rather cheap (it increased the die area by a few percents only, and
> 64bit adds were still fast enough not to slow down the overall chip's
> frequency).
>
> The same must have been true for the Opterons (except that the increase
> in die area much have been even much smaller since the CPU itself had
> become a much smaller part of the overall die because of the
> incorporation of things like the memory controller and the L1 and L2
> caches).
>
> So it was a great move on the part of AMD: cheap to implement but with
> an enormous marketing impact.
>
>
> Stefan
>
>

Re: [OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Stefan Monnier]

>> The original plan/claims was that the support for legacy i386
>> application would be "just as fast".  This never materialized
>> (unsurprisingly: it's easy to make a CPU that can run efficiency several
>> slightly different instruction sets (ISA), like your average amd64 CPU which
>> can run applications using the amd64 ISA, the i386 ISA, the 80286 ISA
>> or the 8086 ISA, more or less; but it's much harder to make a CPU that
>> can run efficiently very different ISAs).
> Apple seems to be doing quite well with the M1.

But that's not a CPU that runs amd64 code: the amd64 code is executed on
it by software emulation rather than by hardware emulation.  And indeed,
Intel could have developed an efficient software emulation of amd64 for
its Itanium which could have been more efficient than its own
hardware emulator.

[ Similarly, at some point in time, DEC's Alpha was claimed to be the
  fastest processor to run i386 code, via its software emulation. ;-)  ]

Apple has a lot of experience in that kind of emulation (having done it
for the transition from Motorola's 68K to PowerPC, then again from
PowerPC to i386, and now from amd64 to ARM (notice they relied on
hardware emulation for the i386 to amd64 transition)).

But note that they only do emulation for applications AFAIK, which is
easier than doing a "full" emulation that lets you run an actual OS
(like `qemu` does).

> There's already work in progress to port Linux mainline (and 
> consequently Debian) to the Apple M1 :)

Since the M1 implements the ARM instruction set, I don't think there's
much work to do here, indeed (most likely the hardest part is to fight
Apple's opaqueness).

Last I heard Debian works on the M1 already :-), but its Emacs package
doesn't :-(


Stefan

Re: [OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Stefan Monnier]

>> Indeed.  Also, they wanted to move away from the i386 instruction set
>> so as not to be bothered by pre-existing licensing agreements with
>> AMD, and thus making sure there'd be no competing implementation.  The
>> IA64 architecture was quite complex, and there are reasons to believe
>> that complexity was seen as a virtue (makes it easier to get more
>> patents and keep competitors out).
> HP then also poured additional stuff into the architecture to make
> migration from PA-RISC easier.  I imagine this also made stuff vastly
> more complex.

It has all the signs of a "design by committee" were you get the union
of all the ideas, indeed :-(

But I think for such a thing to get the time and funding needed to get
to production, there needs to be a commitment to the idea that such
complexity is good.

> I think, IBM is big enough and old enough and established enough with
> POWER that a "young whippersnapper" like Intel is no real danger to them
> in their own enclosed Mainframe walled garden. I believe Apple moving
> away from PowerPC did more damage to IBMs aspirations in that market.

Agreed.

> For the others: they where either on board from the start (like HP),
> where already dead (like DEC/Compaq) or slipping into the embedded
> market (like MIPS).

I didn't want to imply that they would have survived (that slice of the
CPU market was shrinking fast anyway: after the Pentium Pro, they were
not noticeably faster than PCs any more and the market was too small to
keep financing the development of leading CPUs, especially since for
high-end machines all the value was in the interconnect rather than the
CPUs anyway), but the IA64 was explicitly the end of it for them (and
that happened long before the first IA64 CPU was available).

> And SPARC: after being bought by Oracle, the end was more or less
> directly clear.

But that took place much later: the IA64 buzz that killed Alpha/PA/MIPS
was in the 90s whereas Oracle bought SPARC in 2009.

> Indeed. The German computer magazine c't had many interesting articles
> about the IA64 architecture and also quite early painted its dark
> future, because of ever slipping sales figures, performance problems,
> the failure to deliver on made promises and the increasing pressure of
> the i386/amd64 architectures.

>From a purely technical perspective, it's hard to understand how Intel
managed to pour so much energy into such an obviously bad idea.
The only explanations seem all to be linked to market strategies.


Stefan

"Yay for Debian" origin?

[The Wanderer]

In my family's shared music collection, we have a file named
'yay_for_debian-highquality.ogg'. It consists of intermixed, sped-up or
slowed-down or normal-speed clips of various people saying things like
"Debian distributions", "yay for Debian", "we all love Debian here",
"Debian is God", "Debian is Jesus", "apt-get jesus", and so forth.

I don't know where we got this file to begin with, but we have three
different versions: one Ogg Vorbis high-quality, one Ogg Vorbis
lower-quality, and one MP3 (file size in between the other two). The
dates on them range from 2002 to 2004.

Does anyone happen to know where this recording would have originated?
I'm particularly curious as to whose voices those are in the audio clips
that make up the piece.

At least on a naive approach, Google doesn't seem to find any hits with
relevant information.

-- 
   The Wanderer

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw



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Re: [EVEN MORE OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Michael Stone]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 12:53:46PM +, Joe wrote:

On Mon, 15 Mar 2021 12:34:42 +0100 Sven Hartge  wrote:

Imagine a PC with 4GB adressable memory space in 1980.


I can. It would have cost as much as a mainframe to make full use of it.


More. Memory was often the largest line item back then, and ordinary 
mainframes couldn't afford much of it. The Cray 2 was a game-changer in 
the supercomputer space with its 1Gbyte memory capacity. Mostly those 
were bought by three letter agencies, but some really large corporations 
and universities with very generous donors got one.

Re: [EVEN MORE OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[tomas]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 10:45:15AM -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> >> Another rumor I read was that IBM, when developing the first IBM PC in
> >> 1980, opted to use the 8086/8088 CPU instead of the also availble M68k
> >> CPU because the Intel one was less powerful so it would not be in
> >> competition with the mainframes the PC was supposed to interface with
> >> primarily.
> > Too lazy to research now, but it sounds credible, yes.
> 
> I'm sure there have been several different factors and it's hard to know
> which were more important (often the more personal and less technical
> factors are the more important ones in those areas, but the hardest to
> track down and verify).

ISTR that the Big Iron and the small stuff factions whithin IBM were
in fierce competition at the time. That's why the idea seemed plausible
to me.

[...]  Another important factor (linked to pragmatic
> constraints of overall production cost and availability of all the
> various components at particular dates) made it important to use an 8bit
> interface between the CPU and the system (which arguably also ensured it
> was no threat performancewise to the rest of IBM's linup).
> That's another reason why they went with the 8088 rather than the 8086,
> and also another reason why they went with Intel rather than Motorola,
> since the 68008 wasn't available yet.

...the outcome was surely that of multiple factors. IBM was a complex
beast at the time!

Cheers
 - t


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Re: [EVEN MORE OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Stefan Monnier]

>> Another rumor I read was that IBM, when developing the first IBM PC in
>> 1980, opted to use the 8086/8088 CPU instead of the also availble M68k
>> CPU because the Intel one was less powerful so it would not be in
>> competition with the mainframes the PC was supposed to interface with
>> primarily.
> Too lazy to research now, but it sounds credible, yes.

I'm sure there have been several different factors and it's hard to know
which were more important (often the more personal and less technical
factors are the more important ones in those areas, but the hardest to
track down and verify).  Another important factor (linked to pragmatic
constraints of overall production cost and availability of all the
various components at particular dates) made it important to use an 8bit
interface between the CPU and the system (which arguably also ensured it
was no threat performancewise to the rest of IBM's linup).
That's another reason why they went with the 8088 rather than the 8086,
and also another reason why they went with Intel rather than Motorola,
since the 68008 wasn't available yet.


Stefan

Re: [EVEN MORE OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[John Hasler]

Gene writes:
> That, IIRC was a new, super shiny, thing from zilog. No experience
> with it, but if it was as unreliable as the z-80, was, I'm not sorry
> it failed. The Z-80 had an instruction that swapped the
> foregrund/background register sets.  But it only worked on odd hours
> of the day. And had no way of testing if the command had worked
> without sacrificing 1 of the three registers. in both sets.

I used lots of Z80s and had good luck with them.  I wrote an OS for my
first Z80 homebrew computer that used register swapping to service
interrupts and print in the background.  It worked quite well.  Most
applications used only one register set, though, due to the need for
Intel compatibility.

My first Unix machine was an Onyx with a Z8000 running System III.  The
8 inch disk got flaky after about ten years but other than that it was
quite reliable.  Odd architecture, though.  I would have preferred 68k.
-- 
John Hasler 
jhas...@newsguy.com
Elmwood, WI USA

Re: [EVEN MORE OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[tomas]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 10:02:12AM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:

[...]

> Snerk. We all did that back in the day, Tomas. that and similar magazines 
> were this 8th grade graduates electronics education. Do they still exist 
> today? Retired now, so the subs expired.

Some of them: https://www.ee.com/

Cheers
 - t


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Re: [EVEN MORE OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 15 March 2021 09:53:40 to...@tuxteam.de wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 09:31:05AM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > On Monday 15 March 2021 07:05:02 to...@tuxteam.de wrote:
> > > On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 11:09:35AM +0100, Sven Hartge wrote:
> > >
> > > [...]
> > >
> > > > Another rumor I read was that IBM, when developing the first IBM
> > > > PC in 1980, opted to use the 8086/8088 CPU instead of the also
> > > > availble M68k CPU because the Intel one was less powerful so it
> > > > would not be in competition with the mainframes the PC was
> > > > supposed to interface with primarily.
> > >
> > > Too lazy to research now, but it sounds credible, yes.
> > >
> > > > If this rumor is true and IBM had acted differently, the PC
> > > > ecosystem today would also look quite differently.
> > >
> > > Or the Z8000. Absolutely. 8086 was, architecturally, the worst
> > > possible choice at that time.
> >
> > That, IIRC was a new, super shiny, thing from zilog. No experience
> > with it, but if it was as unreliable as the z-80, was, I'm not sorry
> > it failed. The Z-80 had an instruction that swapped the
>
> [...]
>
> I take that back. Z8000 was a 16 bit data/24 bit address thing; it
> did have a segmented architecture, so it wasn't as "clean" as I
> remembered it. At that time I was just a little student, so my
> "experience" with that stuff was to drool over design articles
> in the usual magazines (EE, AFAIR).
>
> Cheers
>  - t
Snerk. We all did that back in the day, Tomas. that and similar magazines 
were this 8th grade graduates electronics education. Do they still exist 
today? Retired now, so the subs expired.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
 - Louis D. Brandeis
Genes Web page 

Re: [EVEN MORE OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[tomas]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 09:31:05AM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Monday 15 March 2021 07:05:02 to...@tuxteam.de wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 11:09:35AM +0100, Sven Hartge wrote:
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > > Another rumor I read was that IBM, when developing the first IBM PC
> > > in 1980, opted to use the 8086/8088 CPU instead of the also availble
> > > M68k CPU because the Intel one was less powerful so it would not be
> > > in competition with the mainframes the PC was supposed to interface
> > > with primarily.
> >
> > Too lazy to research now, but it sounds credible, yes.
> >
> > > If this rumor is true and IBM had acted differently, the PC
> > > ecosystem today would also look quite differently.
> >
> > Or the Z8000. Absolutely. 8086 was, architecturally, the worst
> > possible choice at that time.
> >
> That, IIRC was a new, super shiny, thing from zilog. No experience with 
> it, but if it was as unreliable as the z-80, was, I'm not sorry it 
> failed. The Z-80 had an instruction that swapped the 

[...]

I take that back. Z8000 was a 16 bit data/24 bit address thing; it
did have a segmented architecture, so it wasn't as "clean" as I
remembered it. At that time I was just a little student, so my
"experience" with that stuff was to drool over design articles
in the usual magazines (EE, AFAIR).

Cheers
 - t


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Re: [EVEN MORE OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 15 March 2021 08:53:46 Joe wrote:

> On Mon, 15 Mar 2021 12:34:42 +0100
>
> Sven Hartge  wrote:
> > to...@tuxteam.de wrote:
> > > On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 11:09:35AM +0100, Sven Hartge wrote:
> > >> Another rumor I read was that IBM, when developing the first IBM
> > >> PC in 1980, opted to use the 8086/8088 CPU instead of the also
> > >> availble M68k CPU because the Intel one was less powerful so it
> > >> would not be in competition with the mainframes the PC was
> > >> supposed to interface with primarily.
> > >
> > > Too lazy to research now, but it sounds credible, yes.
> > >
> > >> If this rumor is true and IBM had acted differently, the PC
> > >> ecosystem today would also look quite differently.
> > >
> > > Or the Z8000. Absolutely. 8086 was, architecturally, the worst
> > > possible choice at that time.
> >
> > Having had a 68k would have been awesome. No stupid memory
> > segmentation, 32bit instructions and internal address size, 24bit
> > external address size.
> >
> > Imagine a PC with 4GB adressable memory space in 1980.
>
> I can. It would have cost as much as a mainframe to make full use of
> it.

No it wouldn't, and we had it by the late '80's with the advent of 68040 
abd 68060 accellerator boards for the Amiga's. But that flat memory  
model and poor production QC doomed it.  Any program could make a 
missfire and write into another programs memory space, crashing the 
whole Mary Ann. Then Commode-door brought out a 68060 board for the 
4000's. Major failure because that $1600, 4 square inches of pcb, had 
every electrolytic capacitor installed in reverse polarity. Too damned 
compact to be easily fixed, but I did two of them anyway.

Yup, I am a card carrying CET. What else could I do?

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
 - Louis D. Brandeis
Genes Web page 

Re: Bug: missing package

[Celejar]

On Sun, 14 Mar 2021 21:20:39 -0400
Jude DaShiell  wrote:

> Why is frobtads missing from debian repositories? The frobtads package 
> makes it possible for those living outside of g.u.i. land to play tads 
> games on the console.

frobtads is in Debian non-free, in Sid and Jessie:

https://packages.debian.org/source/sid/frobtads
https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=frobtads=names=all=all

Celejar

Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Andrei POPESCU]

On Lu, 15 mar 21, 09:22:26, Susmita/Rajib wrote:
> 
> Thank you very, very much for all your inputs. Please put this thread
> to rest and focus instead of helping seekers who need your support. I
> have had enough information already from the post of The Wanderer.
 
Lengthy, more or less offtopic threads are sort of a tradition on 
debian-user during the freeze, mostly because the level of issues is at 
its lowest ;)

> Actually, I would have very much needed your precious inputs, had i a
> plan to write an article on the topic.

Most of the information in this thread isn't quoting any (authoritative) 
sources[1], it's probably better to look for other sources for an 
article.

> May be, Debian should make a summary of all the information collected
> from here and post an article on its page for a pre-emptive
> clarification on the flavours that Debian is available in, and not let
> the information accumulated here go waste.

For Debian's purposes the information can probably be summarized as a 
Frequently Asked Question, like:

Q: Why is the 64bit x86 architecture named 'amd64' whereas the 32bit 
version is named 'i386'?
A: Because the AMD64 / x86-64 architecture was introduced by AMD.

(probably with a link to the corresponding Wikipedia page)


This already exists in some form in at least one place on Debian's 
sites, so I'll ask you instead:

Where should this information be added to be more easily found by 
users less familiar with Debian (and its history)?


[1] Wikipedia generally provides a good introduction to a specific 
topic, but it's *not* authoritative. It can be a good start for further 
research though.

For Debian's own decisions a good source could be mailing list posts 
from Debian Developers at the time announcing the new architecture.

Kind regards,
Andrei
-- 
http://wiki.debian.org/FAQsFromDebianUser


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Re: [EVEN MORE OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 15 March 2021 07:05:02 to...@tuxteam.de wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 11:09:35AM +0100, Sven Hartge wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > Another rumor I read was that IBM, when developing the first IBM PC
> > in 1980, opted to use the 8086/8088 CPU instead of the also availble
> > M68k CPU because the Intel one was less powerful so it would not be
> > in competition with the mainframes the PC was supposed to interface
> > with primarily.
>
> Too lazy to research now, but it sounds credible, yes.
>
> > If this rumor is true and IBM had acted differently, the PC
> > ecosystem today would also look quite differently.
>
> Or the Z8000. Absolutely. 8086 was, architecturally, the worst
> possible choice at that time.
>
That, IIRC was a new, super shiny, thing from zilog. No experience with 
it, but if it was as unreliable as the z-80, was, I'm not sorry it 
failed. The Z-80 had an instruction that swapped the 
foregrund/background register sets.  But it only worked on odd hours of 
the day. And had no way of testing if the command had worked without 
sacrificing 1 of the three registers. in both sets.

When I finally got schmardter and wrote a test loop to check it, called 
zilog, and it was out of their 90 day warranty. They would not replace 
it. I should have called them and got a sample, but I'm honest and told 
them the truth. I never again used a zilog chip in anything.

I was then on a small town AM/FM radio stations budget, developing an 
Automatic Transmitter System for a temperature picky fm transmitter that 
really ought to have been replaced, starting with the brand label on the 
front panel.

This was in 1980, and the late 70's saw many Ma and Pa small town 
broadcasters severely impacted by trying to replace aging tube 
transmitters with early solid state versions before the tech was mature 
enough to be as dependable as the tube models. It took another ten years 
before the semi failure rates went below that of electrolytic 
capacitors.

Now design rule violations by the gear makers are responsible for a good 
share of the failure bugs. But they are a distant part of the list, well 
behind electrolytic caps whose technology has not been seriously 
improved in a hundred years now.  Even Tesla has put money into new 
versions, and come up short or they would be in his cars replaceing the 
lithium and dangerous batteries right now.

> Cheers
>  - t
Take care and stay safe and well, Tomas.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
 - Louis D. Brandeis
Genes Web page 

Re: [EVEN MORE OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Joe]

On Mon, 15 Mar 2021 12:34:42 +0100
Sven Hartge  wrote:

> to...@tuxteam.de wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 11:09:35AM +0100, Sven Hartge wrote:  
> 
> >> Another rumor I read was that IBM, when developing the first IBM PC
> >> in 1980, opted to use the 8086/8088 CPU instead of the also
> >> availble M68k CPU because the Intel one was less powerful so it
> >> would not be in competition with the mainframes the PC was
> >> supposed to interface with primarily.  
> 
> > Too lazy to research now, but it sounds credible, yes.  
> 
> >> If this rumor is true and IBM had acted differently, the PC
> >> ecosystem today would also look quite differently.  
> 
> > Or the Z8000. Absolutely. 8086 was, architecturally, the worst
> > possible choice at that time.  
> 
> Having had a 68k would have been awesome. No stupid memory
> segmentation, 32bit instructions and internal address size, 24bit
> external address size.
> 
> Imagine a PC with 4GB adressable memory space in 1980.
> 
>
I can. It would have cost as much as a mainframe to make full use of it.

-- 
Joe

Re: [EVEN MORE OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[IL Ka]

>
>
> No stupid memory segmentation,
>

IMHO segmentation was a good idea originally.
You could have separate segments for code and data and since 286 it is
possible to protect them (AFAIK segments were also used to separate
user-space and kernel-space)
But with the advent of virtual memory (386), they have become an obsolete
legacy.

Intel is full of such things: hardware context switching, some old MMX
instructions, I/O ports, real mode: nobody needs all of that in 2021, but
it exists and occupies place in "intel development manual"

Re: [EVEN MORE OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[tomas]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 12:34:42PM +0100, Sven Hartge wrote:

[...]

> Having had a 68k would have been awesome. No stupid memory segmentation,

So were Z8000, NS32K and many others. The horrible segmentation thing on
the '86 were the tribute to backward compatibility, which is the price
you pay for market dominance :-)

> 32bit instructions and internal address size, 24bit external address size.
> 
> Imagine a PC with 4GB adressable memory space in 1980.

Yup.

Cheers
 - t


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Re: [EVEN MORE OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Sven Hartge]

to...@tuxteam.de wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 11:09:35AM +0100, Sven Hartge wrote:

>> Another rumor I read was that IBM, when developing the first IBM PC
>> in 1980, opted to use the 8086/8088 CPU instead of the also availble
>> M68k CPU because the Intel one was less powerful so it would not be
>> in competition with the mainframes the PC was supposed to interface
>> with primarily.

> Too lazy to research now, but it sounds credible, yes.

>> If this rumor is true and IBM had acted differently, the PC ecosystem
>> today would also look quite differently.

> Or the Z8000. Absolutely. 8086 was, architecturally, the worst possible
> choice at that time.

Having had a 68k would have been awesome. No stupid memory segmentation,
32bit instructions and internal address size, 24bit external address size.

Imagine a PC with 4GB adressable memory space in 1980.

S°

-- 
Sigmentation fault. Core dumped.

Re: [EVEN MORE OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[tomas]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 11:09:35AM +0100, Sven Hartge wrote:

[...]

> Another rumor I read was that IBM, when developing the first IBM PC in
> 1980, opted to use the 8086/8088 CPU instead of the also availble M68k
> CPU because the Intel one was less powerful so it would not be in
> competition with the mainframes the PC was supposed to interface with
> primarily.

Too lazy to research now, but it sounds credible, yes.

> If this rumor is true and IBM had acted differently, the PC ecosystem
> today would also look quite differently.

Or the Z8000. Absolutely. 8086 was, architecturally, the worst possible
choice at that time.

Cheers
 - t


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Re: Engegada aleatòria

[Joan Albert]

Hola Jordi,

De nou, moltes gràcies pel teu temps.

> Entenc que això és la sortida de dmesg d'una arrencada que ha funcionat
> correctament. 

Efectivament, és la sortida d'una arrencada que ha funcionat
correctament.

> Amb el canvi aquest del grub el proper cop que l'ordinador no s'engegui
> correctament la pantalla no amagarà cap missatge que s'hagi escrit, de manera
> que espero que surti alguna cosa interessant que ens doni una pista, més enllà
> d'aquell "Loading initial ramdisk" que ens vas posar a l'inici.
> - Per veure el llistat d'arrencades de l'ordinador: # journalctl --list-boots

El tema és que no trobo més informació d'arrencades no
satisfactòries. He revisat el llistat d'arrencades utilitzant la comanda
# journalctl --list-boots i només apareixen les arrencades que han
funcionat (només apareix una del dia d'ahir, i en total devien ser 15
intents). Tampoc apareixien més missatges a part de "Loading initial
ramdisk", tot i canviar els paràmetres del grub i fer l'actualització.

Salut,

-- 
Joan Albert

Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Dan Ritter]

Susmita/Rajib wrote: 
> May be, Debian should make a summary of all the information collected
> from here and post an article on its page for a pre-emptive
> clarification on the flavours that Debian is available in, and not let
> the information accumulated here go waste.


Wikipedia has quite a good article at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64

which is also linked at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD64

-dsr-

Re: [EVEN MORE OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Sven Hartge]

to...@tuxteam.de wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 09:15:10AM +0100, Sven Hartge wrote:

>> For the others: they where either on board from the start (like HP),
>> where already dead (like DEC/Compaq) or slipping into the embedded
>> market (like MIPS).

> MIPS had its chance to become the unified architecture for high-end
> workstations [1]. Until it was bought up by Silicon Graphics (SGI).
> Which, on the one hand was bitterly needed by MIPS, because they
> needed that cash injection, and by SGI, because they depended on the
> MIPS architecture.

> On the other hand, though, all other workstation developers, in fierce
> competition with SGI, didn't want /that/ dependency and went to look
> for/make other architectures (Power, Alpha, PA, you name it).

> So on the one hand, we might have, these days, been running on MIPS;
> on that other hand, we wouldn't have ARM, and -- who knows, soon,
> Risc-V. And Linus Torvalds wouldn't have had this cool stint at
> Transmeta. But that is a totally different kettle of fish. 

Another rumor I read was that IBM, when developing the first IBM PC in
1980, opted to use the 8086/8088 CPU instead of the also availble M68k
CPU because the Intel one was less powerful so it would not be in
competition with the mainframes the PC was supposed to interface with
primarily.

If this rumor is true and IBM had acted differently, the PC ecosystem
today would also look quite differently.

Grüße,
Sven.

-- 
Sigmentation fault. Core dumped.

Re: Social-media antipathy (was Re: How i can optimize my operating system?)

[tomas]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 10:54:26AM +0200, Andrei POPESCU wrote:

[...]

> I'm better at asynchronous as well, but still find instant messaging to 
> have it's uses [...]

> And then there's group chats. There's a reason IRC still exists ;)

Agreed. Tools, jobs and all that :)

Cheers
 - t


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Re: [EVEN MORE OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[tomas]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 09:15:10AM +0100, Sven Hartge wrote:

[...]

> For the others: they where either on board from the start (like HP),
> where already dead (like DEC/Compaq) or slipping into the embedded
> market (like MIPS).

MIPS had its chance to become the unified architecture for high-end
workstations [1]. Until it was bought up by Silicon Graphics (SGI).
Which, on the one hand was bitterly needed by MIPS, because they
needed that cash injection, and by SGI, because they depended on the
MIPS architecture.

On the other hand, though, all other workstation developers, in fierce
competition with SGI, didn't want /that/ dependency and went to look
for/make other architectures (Power, Alpha, PA, you name it).

So on the one hand, we might have, these days, been running on MIPS;
on that other hand, we wouldn't have ARM, and -- who knows, soon,
Risc-V. And Linus Torvalds wouldn't have had this cool stint at
Transmeta. But that is a totally different kettle of fish. 

Or is it?

> -- 
> Sigmentation fault. Core dumped.

:-)

Reminds me of an error message somewhere deep in TeX's or
METAFONT's bowels (sorry, from memory, therefore imprecise)
asking for "...someone to fix me fix me".

Cheers

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Computing_Environment

 - t


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Re: Social-media antipathy (was Re: How i can optimize my operating system?)

[Andrei POPESCU]

On Du, 14 mar 21, 14:49:03, Joe wrote:
> On Sun, 14 Mar 2021 13:23:17 +0100
>  wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, Mar 14, 2021 at 02:08:34PM +0200, Andrei POPESCU wrote:
> > > On Du, 14 mar 21, 12:19:34, to...@tuxteam.de wrote:  
> > 
> > [...]
> > > > in the first place, I'm not the target audience for instant
> > > > messaging anyway.  
> > > 
> > > Every step towards more privacy is good. Let's not let the perfect
> > > be the enemy of the good.  
> > 
> > Mp doubt. Still, that wouldn't convince me to start instant messaging.
> > I'm more of an asynchronous type ;-)
> > 
> 
> If you need 'now!', pick up the phone.

I'm better at asynchronous as well, but still find instant messaging to 
have it's uses, e.g. for things like "be there in 10 minutes", which is 
almost as fast as calling and doesn't require the recipient to answer 
(whereas as call would require their full attention).

And then there's group chats. There's a reason IRC still exists ;)

Kind regards,
Andrei
-- 
http://wiki.debian.org/FAQsFromDebianUser


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Re: [OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Andrei POPESCU]

On Du, 14 mar 21, 15:17:39, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> 
> The original plan/claims was that the support for legacy i386
> application would be "just as fast".  This never materialized
> (unsurprisingly: it's easy to make a CPU that can run efficiency several
> slightly different instruction sets (ISA), like your average amd64 CPU which
> can run applications using the amd64 ISA, the i386 ISA, the 80286 ISA
> or the 8086 ISA, more or less; but it's much harder to make a CPU that
> can run efficiently very different ISAs).

Apple seems to be doing quite well with the M1. Apparently it has a few 
custom instructions to speed up x86 emulation. They also have the 
benefit of controlling the software and now also the hardware stack.

There's already work in progress to port Linux mainline (and 
consequently Debian) to the Apple M1 :)

Kind regards,
Andrei
-- 
http://wiki.debian.org/FAQsFromDebianUser


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Re: Debian( live version) question

[Andrei POPESCU]

On Du, 14 mar 21, 16:09:59, jacky cheung wrote:
> Hi
> 
> Im using the Debian live version non free
> How can I change my user@debian on terminal to myname@debian. Im using for
> my education purpose.

Do you want to change your user name for the live system or do you 
simply want change the terminal prompt?

Kind regards,
Andrei
-- 
http://wiki.debian.org/FAQsFromDebianUser


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Re: [OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems

[Sven Hartge]

Stefan Monnier  wrote:

>> Note: when IA64 was designed (starting in 1994 at HP) we where nowhere
>> near the limits of the 32bit i386 architecture with RAM and frequency,
>> so it made sense, somewhat.

> Indeed.  Also, they wanted to move away from the i386 instruction set
> so as not to be bothered by pre-existing licensing agreements with
> AMD, and thus making sure there'd be no competing implementation.  The
> IA64 architecture was quite complex, and there are reasons to believe
> that complexity was seen as a virtue (makes it easier to get more
> patents and keep competitors out).

HP then also poured additional stuff into the architecture to make
migration from PA-RISC easier. I imagine this also made stuff vastly
more complex.

>> But years passed and the i386 architecture got better and better,
>> including stuff like MMX, SSE and AVX was incorporated, IA64 couldn't
>> really keep up.

> The IA64 architecture was a resounding success in one area tho: it
> killed most of the competition that was coming from "above" (at least
> DEC's Alpha, SGI's MIPS, HP's PA, and it likely sped up the demise of
> Sun's SPARC, I don't think it had much impact on POWER or PowerPC,
> OTOH) and thus helped open up the server (and supercomputer) market
> for Intel (and AMD).

I think, IBM is big enough and old enough and established enough with
POWER that a "young whippersnapper" like Intel is no real danger to them
in their own enclosed Mainframe walled garden. I believe Apple moving
away from PowerPC did more damage to IBMs aspirations in that market.

For the others: they where either on board from the start (like HP),
where already dead (like DEC/Compaq) or slipping into the embedded
market (like MIPS).

And SPARC: after being bought by Oracle, the end was more or less
directly clear.

>> Dnd when AMD then presented their AMD64 architecture that could run
>> legacy 8bit/16bit/32bit code as fast as the new code, allowing for a
>> smooth transition, the nickname "Itanic" for IA64 became true: It had
>> been dead on arrival.

> To make matters worse, the IA64 arrived very late to the market (IIRC
> something like 3 years later than planned).

Indeed. The German computer magazine c't had many interesting articles
about the IA64 architecture and also quite early painted its dark
future, because of ever slipping sales figures, performance problems,
the failure to deliver on made promises and the increasing pressure of
the i386/amd64 architectures.

Grüße,
S°

-- 
Sigmentation fault. Core dumped.

Re: Engegada aleatòria

[Joan Albert]

Hola Jordi,

> Pot ser que tinguis el GRUB configurat amb "quiet" i/o "splash" ?? Si
> és així ho podries modificar per poder veure el que s'imprimeix a la
> pantalla quan l'ordinador es congela.
> 
> Bàsicament hauries de editar el fitxer /etc/default/grub i modificar
> una línea que dirá algo similar a aixo:
> GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet"
> Pots deixar la variable buida. Guardes el fitxer i després apliques la
> configuració executant la comanda (com a root):
> update-grub2

Gràcies per la resposta. He fet el canvi que has comentat i això és el
que he pogut treure de la comanda "sudo dmesg". No sé què podria ser
rellevant i què no, per això enganxo tot fins a l'inicialització de
systemd; espero que no sigui un problema.

Gràcies amb antelació!

[0.00] microcode: microcode updated early to revision 0xe2, date
= 2020-07-14
[0.00] Linux version 5.10.0-4-amd64
[0.00] Command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-5.10.0-4-amd64
root=UUID=0ddc0be7-b651-4644-8876-3871a66513bc ro
[0.00] x86/fpu: Supporting XSAVE feature 0x001: 'x87 floating
point registers'
[0.00] x86/fpu: Supporting XSAVE feature 0x002: 'SSE registers'
[0.00] x86/fpu: Supporting XSAVE feature 0x004: 'AVX registers'
[0.00] x86/fpu: Supporting XSAVE feature 0x008: 'MPX bounds
registers'
[0.00] x86/fpu: Supporting XSAVE feature 0x010: 'MPX CSR'
[0.00] x86/fpu: xstate_offset[2]:  576, xstate_sizes[2]:  256
[0.00] x86/fpu: xstate_offset[3]:  832, xstate_sizes[3]:   64
[0.00] x86/fpu: xstate_offset[4]:  896, xstate_sizes[4]:   64
[0.00] x86/fpu: Enabled xstate features 0x1f, context size is
960 bytes, using 'compacted' format.
[0.00] BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
[0.00] BIOS-e820: [mem 0x-0x00057fff]
usable
[0.00] BIOS-e820: [mem 0x00058000-0x00058fff]
reserved
[0.00] BIOS-e820: [mem 0x00059000-0x0009dfff]
usable
[0.00] BIOS-e820: [mem 0x0009e000-0x0009efff]
reserved
[0.00] BIOS-e820: [mem 0x0009f000-0x0009]
usable
[0.00] BIOS-e820: [mem 0x000a-0x000f]
reserved
[0.00] BIOS-e820: [mem 0x0010-0xd90fafff]
usable
[0.00] BIOS-e820: [mem 0xd90fb000-0xd95fafff]
type 20
[0.00] BIOS-e820: [mem 0xd95fb000-0xd9c7efff]
reserved
[0.00] BIOS-e820: [mem 0xd9c7f000-0xd9e7efff]
ACPI NVS
[0.00] BIOS-e820: [mem 0xd9e7f000-0xd9efefff]
ACPI data
[0.00] BIOS-e820: [mem 0xd9eff000-0xd9ef]
usable
[0.00] BIOS-e820: [mem 0xd9f0-0xde7f]
reserved
[0.00] BIOS-e820: [mem 0xf80fa000-0xf80fafff]
reserved
[0.00] BIOS-e820: [mem 0xf80fd000-0xf80fdfff]
reserved
[0.00] BIOS-e820: [mem 0xfe00-0xfe010fff]
reserved
[0.00] BIOS-e820: [mem 0x0001-0x00031f7f]
usable
[0.00] NX (Execute Disable) protection: active
[0.00] efi: EFI v2.40 by HP
[0.00] efi: ACPI=0xd9efe000 ACPI 2.0=0xd9efe014
SMBIOS=0xd98db000 ESRT=0xd9077660
[0.00] secureboot: Secure boot could not be determined (mode 0)
[0.00] SMBIOS 2.7 present.
[0.00] DMI: HP HP ProBook 650 G2/80FD, BIOS N76 Ver. 01.02
03/01/2016
[0.00] tsc: Detected 2400.000 MHz processor
[0.000619] e820: update [mem 0x-0x0fff] usable ==>
reserved
[0.000621] e820: remove [mem 0x000a-0x000f] usable
[0.000627] last_pfn = 0x31f800 max_arch_pfn = 0x4
[0.000631] MTRR default type: write-back
[0.000632] MTRR fixed ranges enabled:
[0.000633]   0-9 write-back
[0.000634]   A-B uncachable
[0.000635]   C-F write-protect
[0.000636] MTRR variable ranges enabled:
[0.000637]   0 base 00E000 mask 7FE000 uncachable
[0.000638]   1 base 00DC00 mask 7FFC00 uncachable
[0.000638]   2 disabled
[0.000639]   3 disabled
[0.000640]   4 disabled
[0.000640]   5 disabled
[0.000641]   6 disabled
[0.000641]   7 disabled
[0.000642]   8 disabled
[0.000642]   9 disabled
[0.000981] x86/PAT: Configuration [0-7]: WB  WC  UC- UC  WB  WP  UC-
WT
[0.001552] last_pfn = 0xd9f00 max_arch_pfn = 0x4
[0.009443] esrt: ESRT header is not in the memory map.
[0.009450] Using GB pages for direct mapping
[0.009897] RAMDISK: [mem 0x321b7000-0x350d2fff]
[0.009903] ACPI: Early table checksum verification disabled
[0.009906] ACPI: RSDP 0xD9EFE014 24 (v02 HPQOEM)
[0.009910] ACPI: XSDT 0xD9EBC188 E4 (v01 HPQOEM SLIC-BPC
  0113)
[0.009915] ACPI: FACP 0xD9EEE000 F4 (v05 HPQOEM SLIC-BPC
 HP   0001)
[0.009920] ACPI: DSDT 0xD9EC5000 0250E4 (v02 HPQOEM 80FD

Re: Creating a tap device.

[john doe]

TL-DR.

On 3/14/2021 4:54 PM, pe...@easthope.ca wrote:

From: "Alexander V. Makartsev" 
Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2021 11:41:47 +0500

But it wasn't creating a device with chosen name anywhere under "/dev" or 
"/dev/net/".
I believe, "/dev/net/tun" device is created when "tun" kernel module is 
inserted.


Crucial tip.  Thanks Alexander.

Consequently I made these arrangements.

(1) Put "tun" in /etc/modules.

peter@joule:/home/peter$ grep tun /etc/modules
tun



Is the tun module also for the tap module?
I could be rong but I would not mix both of them.


(2) Put "@reboot ip tuntap add mode tap tap0" in /etc/crontab.

peter@joule:/home/peter$ grep tap  /etc/crontab
@reboot ip tuntap add mode tap tap0

(3) Reboot.

(4) Verify that tap0 is present.

peter@joule:/home/peter$ ip link show dev tap0
6: tap0:  mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP mo
de DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
 link/ether 0a:c1:8e:81:78:aa brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

Good.  Tomorrow will try a few more steps.



Note that with Libvirt and simply creating a bridge, makes guests
visible on the network.

--
John Doe