Re: [gentoo-amd64] boottime
Hi Florian, on Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 11:43:12AM +0100, you wrote: When your initrd doesn't have much to do, it won't take much time. Genkernel's (great) init-script is quit huge. If you don't need all of its functionality (module loading, net boot, ...) you can delete these parts. Yes, I'd probably have gone for one of the minimal scripts described in various DM-crypt howtos anzway, but... You could also use something other than a bourne-shell script - a small C program or a script in a faster shell/script language. ...that's a pretty good idea too :) Hm, reminds me: is there any reason to use an initrd instead of just putting all those binaries on /boot if the kernel as all the drivers compiled in anyway? cheers, Matthias -- I prefer encrypted and signed messages. KeyID: FAC37665 Fingerprint: 8C16 3F0A A6FC DF0D 19B0 8DEF 48D9 1700 FAC3 7665 pgpDXuxesPC9W.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: boottime
Hi Volker, on Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 11:29:22AM +0100, you wrote: there are people who know how to use a commandline and STILL want X. In fact out of 100 boots I want X 99 times - and I guess most people want X too. So just because you 'think' gentoo users don't like X, does not make it true at all. I agree having X in the default runlevel is a good idea for the vast majority of users, even the most CLI-savvy. But having it in the boot runlevel was a major PITA when SuSE started doing it and I had to manage some installations that used NIS and LDAP. We wanted a nice user list in kdm for students to click on, and it just doesn't work if *dm starts before ypbind. You can choose not to have the user list or live with the inconsistent broken look on first boot, or put X back in level 5. cheers, Matthias -- I prefer encrypted and signed messages. KeyID: FAC37665 Fingerprint: 8C16 3F0A A6FC DF0D 19B0 8DEF 48D9 1700 FAC3 7665 pgpfVRy7mWoTV.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-amd64] boottime
Hi Volker, on Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 09:53:02PM +0100, you wrote: with 'don't use genkernel' I meant 'don't use an initrd' - because it adds a lot of time to the boot. And with everything essential in the kernel it is a useless waste of time. But even if you don't use genkernel to create an initrd - there is no reason to use it at all. Well, there are. I was just about to add one to my system to use tuxonice with encrypted swap. AFAICS there's no way to have both at the moment without an initrd. Although I don't really see why it *should* be, cryptsetup being the only thing that needs to run before I can resume; I think it should be possible to hack some in-kernel cryptsetup using kdb's keyboard handling, just that nobody has done it yet :) cheers, Matthias -- I prefer encrypted and signed messages. KeyID: FAC37665 Fingerprint: 8C16 3F0A A6FC DF0D 19B0 8DEF 48D9 1700 FAC3 7665 pgpKzvHK4eBDM.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-amd64] amd64codecs masked
Hi Daniel, on Sat, Nov 08, 2008 at 11:37:42PM +0200, you wrote: Thanks for the reply. I hate to unmask packages, because I forget to clean the entries when they become obsolete. It seems I'll make an exception this time. I used to hate that job but since the eix package added eix-test-obsolete, it's been a breeze. Just drop a little script in /etc/cron.monthly so you'll get a mail with the output if you tend to forget it (not that it hurt much if you do). cheers, Matthias -- I prefer encrypted and signed messages. KeyID: FAC37665 Fingerprint: 8C16 3F0A A6FC DF0D 19B0 8DEF 48D9 1700 FAC3 7665 pgplHWgJT5ujP.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: Symlinks vs. Bind mounts.
Hi Duncan, on Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 08:07:40AM +, you wrote: I have two 500G disks, mirrored in a software-RAID0 on all partitions but swap which is on two separate 16G partitions. OK, if it's RAID-0, it's striped, not mirrored, and you have NO redundancy at all. If either of those disks fails, your SOL. If it's mirrored, you meant RAID-1. Ouch---you're right of course, it's RAID-1. Not the first time I confused the two but the setup is indeed mirrored ;) cheers, Matthias -- I prefer encrypted and signed messages. KeyID: FAC37665 Fingerprint: 8C16 3F0A A6FC DF0D 19B0 8DEF 48D9 1700 FAC3 7665 pgprghKLYYdlc.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: Symlinks vs. Bind mounts.
Hi Richard, on Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 02:08:26PM -0400, you wrote: Note that in such a situation if either disk fails you're likely to end up with a panic when your swap device isn't accessible. If uptime is a concern mirrored swap is better (but slower). Of course, if you're running on consumer hardware chances are that computer is going to fail if a drive hangs up in any case - most motherboards don't handle drive failures gracefully, but server-class hardware usually isolates drives so that a drive failure doesn't take down the system. True, that's a risk I figured I could live with. It's actually a server board but in a regular tower case and w/o hot-swappable drives, and I'm not controlling my iron lung with it :) cheers, Matthias -- I prefer encrypted and signed messages. KeyID: FAC37665 Fingerprint: 8C16 3F0A A6FC DF0D 19B0 8DEF 48D9 1700 FAC3 7665 pgph9TSmrVXby.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: Symlinks vs. Bind mounts.
Hi Peter, on Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 11:04:13AM +0100, you wrote: You could always allocate another swap partition. One of my boxes has 4 2GB partitions on different disks, though that's far more than I need. You still get the benefit of automatic striping so if they're on independent channels you have roughly four times the swap throughput. I have two 500G disks, mirrored in a software-RAID0 on all partitions but swap which is on two separate 16G partitions. cheers, Matthias -- I prefer encrypted and signed messages. KeyID: FAC37665 Fingerprint: 8C16 3F0A A6FC DF0D 19B0 8DEF 48D9 1700 FAC3 7665 pgp3SWMjMhnVI.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: Symlinks vs. Bind mounts.
Hi Juan, on Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 05:18:53AM -0300, you wrote: If I follow this advice, what happens when I compile something like Open Office which allocates 3-4GB in /var/tmp during compilation and I only have 2GB physical RAM in the computer? If all the Virtual Memory (VM = RAM+SWAP) is exhausted the kernel will try to kill the process that is consuming most of it. That's why tmpfs also uses swapspace. Given the address space you have on a 64bit system, I don't see any reason[0] to save swapspace any more---after I tried the tmpfs idea for the first time, I just repartitioned my system for 32 GiB of swap and put /tmp and /var/tmp/portage on tmpfs. Just perfect. Not only does this speed up everything that uses temporary files, it also minimizes the effect of programs that fragment or leak their memory, like FF2 that had a habit of packing small cached things after big ones and then not reusing the big ones after they had been freed and thus ballooning to perverse sizes. I've seen a Firefox grow to over 10 GiB (at 4 GB physical RAM) with minimal impact on the rest of the system because the hardly ever touched pages just get paged out at some point and don't matter as long as they stay on disk. cheers, Matthias [0] OK, there is small overhead due to larger page tables but it's negligible. -- I prefer encrypted and signed messages. KeyID: FAC37665 Fingerprint: 8C16 3F0A A6FC DF0D 19B0 8DEF 48D9 1700 FAC3 7665 pgpPaXNkjDucL.pgp Description: PGP signature
