Re: [gentoo-user] Upgrading old kernel
On 4/15/20 1:40 PM, Andreas Stiasny wrote: > On 15.04.20 17:50, Rich Freeman wrote: >> Jumping from >> 3.18 you're somewhat more likely to run into issues - your biggest >> headache though will be dealing with the 30,000 prompts you get from >> make oldconfig and making sure you set all the new options correctly. > That's why I use make olddefconfig in such a case. This takes all the > old config values and uses the default for the new ones. If you know > that you need one or more of the new config options you can fine tune > them afterwards with make menuconfig. > Andreas james responded: > Ah. never used olddefconfig, I'll give it a spin. That raises the question, what if you have no kernel config, as may be the case if you are going to Gentoo for the first time, or are cross-compiling from FreeBSD or NetBSD? I have tried with OpenADK (www.openadk.org), which got as far as successfully building cross-gcc some of the time, but never succeeded at building the kernel. Is defconfig the best starting point? One would want to maximize the probability of success building the kernel while retaining a functional system that would support vital hardware including ethernet, wi-fi, hard drives and USB, and I would need to be able to read a NetBSD or FreeBSD file system (UFS/FFSv1 or 2). I use GPT, so there are no traditional now-deprecated BSD disklabels that Linux would not recognize. If I just start with menuconfig, I could miss some vital parts. OpenADK started with a minimal kernel config, maybe it was too minimal? I have successfully compiled kernels and userlands on FreeBSD and NetBSD (no menuconfig, defconfig, etc; kernel configs start with a GENERIC config). NetBSD kernel config is much longer than FreeBSD kernel config but is dwarfed by Linux kernel config. Tom
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sudden case fan problems by switching to new kernel...
On 04/15 05:13, Ian Zimmerman wrote: > On 2020-04-15 07:29, tu...@posteo.de wrote: > > > The configuration for kernel 5.6.3. (vanilla) works fine.for me. Then > > I changed to kernel 5.6.4 using the same configuration. > > > > Suddenlu the fan at the back of my PC case never stops from rotating > > at its highest speed. Changing back to kernel 5.6.3. and the problem > > is gone. > > Something similar happened to me too with a recent kernel upgrade but in > the 5.4's. > > The reason was that my kernel config changed to build the default CPU > powersave driver as a module, and apparently that is a poor idea, it > needs to be built in. When I rebuilt the kernel with the driver built > in, the fan went back to normal. > > In your case: are both scenarios on the same hardware, since as we all > know you're just switching? > > -- > Ian > Hi Ian, I only switched the kernel. Anything else remains the same. I will check for the "modules effect" you described and I am prettu sure, that this will in my case, also! I will report later, if a will have some results... Cheers! Meino
[gentoo-user] Re: Sudden case fan problems by switching to new kernel...
On 2020-04-15 07:29, tu...@posteo.de wrote: > The configuration for kernel 5.6.3. (vanilla) works fine.for me. Then > I changed to kernel 5.6.4 using the same configuration. > > Suddenlu the fan at the back of my PC case never stops from rotating > at its highest speed. Changing back to kernel 5.6.3. and the problem > is gone. Something similar happened to me too with a recent kernel upgrade but in the 5.4's. The reason was that my kernel config changed to build the default CPU powersave driver as a module, and apparently that is a poor idea, it needs to be built in. When I rebuilt the kernel with the driver built in, the fan went back to normal. In your case: are both scenarios on the same hardware, since as we all know you're just switching? -- Ian
[gentoo-user] Re: xorg-server
On 2020-04-14 21:36, Jorge Almeida wrote: > Yes, that seems right. I just added "-elogind" to make.conf and that's > it. But I'm really curious about the framebuffer stuff. As for other > stuff (mounting USB, etc), doing it by hand it's fine. One possible implication is that without one of these mystery packages, you need the Xorg binary to be setuid root, and with them, you don't. Just a hypothesis: I don't use either elogind or ConsoleKit, and my Xorg is setuid root. :-( This also links back to my last question about firefox. It turned out that the rare and random crashes stopped when I shifted from allowing X to start on the first unused tty (which is the default) to starting it on the tty where I'm already logged in. I'm thinking this is somehow related to my user id and permissions on the tty. Possibly with one of the login managers it is not an issue. -- Ian
Re: [gentoo-user] Upgrading old kernel
On Wed, Apr 15, 2020 at 2:31 PM james wrote: > > On 4/15/20 11:40 AM, Rich Freeman wrote: > > > I personally use the latest longterm, but not until it has been out > > for a few months. Mainly this is because I use zfs and don't want to > > deal with what versions of the one are compatible with what versions > > of the other. > > Yep, for the main system, but using btrfs with redundant drives. I'd > like zfs, but not certain about it's future being open, open-source, > etc. btrfs has bee great, for what I have done recently. > So, a few comments here: First, I used to use btrfs and I'd say it is just as important to stick with a longterm using btrfs because that project has a terrible history of introducing regressions in new kernel releases. If I were using btrfs I'm not sure I'd even go with 5.4 over 4.19 as it has only been around a few months and I'd be concerned they haven't worked out all the btrfs bugs yet. Now, I haven't used btrfs recently, so maybe things have gotten much better, but I'm skeptical on that front. I've had to do complete btrfs reinstalls more than once from backups, and this was on btrfs raid1 only. I REALLY like the feature set and design/etc of btrfs and think it definitely could be the future of linux mainstream storage, but for whatever reason QA has been a big problem and it has taken way longer than I expected to mature. It was btrfs QA problems that drove me to pay such close attention to what kernel series I was running. That is why I've mainly moved to zfs as my main general-purpose filesystem on hosts where restoring from backup isn't about popping an SDcard out of a Pi and flashing a couple GB backup image onto it. I'm not entirely happy with some of the limitations of zfs and of course it not being in-mainline is a huge hassle. There really is no risk of it not being FOSS - it is FOSS and of course it always will be as is the case with anything FOSS. Whether anybody is contributing to it in 10 years is another matter, but it isn't like the license has an expiry date on it. The #3 openzfs contributor is a Gentoo dev. I suspect the main risk to zfs is that btrfs finally gets its quality level up sufficiently that people switch over, which would be great. Either that or zfs gets sloppy with QA and people abandon it, which would be terrible, but probably unlikely at this point. For larger-scale storage I'm using Lizardfs and greatly admire Ceph as well in this space. MooseFS is another option (which Lizardfs is a fork of). These distributed filesystems are generally more flexible than zfs and give you redundancy above the host level. Right now the bulk of my storage is on lizardfs with the lizardfs chunkservers being implemented on top of zfs. That gives me the data security benefits of zfs but without the inflexibility, since I don't pool drives so I'm not limited by the ability to add/remove/etc drives from zfs pools. That said, vdev removal has become a thing in v0.8 and perhaps we'll see increased flexibility in the future. Overall zfs and btrfs are actually converging somewhat, just from different target audiences. IMO with the growing importance of distributed filesystems I think that the main niche for zfs and btrfs will be as a general-purpose filesystem similar to ext4 but with additional flexibility (volume management) and robustness (raid/checksums/etc). Once you get bigger than a few drives Ceph will become the gold standard for storage, or at least that is the leading technology right now. Lizardfs is more of a ghetto Ceph that doesn't require dozens of GB of RAM per server. If you haven't been upgrading kernels you may have just missed all the fun of btrfs regressions over recent years. :) In any case unless things have changed a lot I'd seriously consider longterms and then carefully checking for regressions before doing upgrades between major versions. -- Rich
Re: [gentoo-user] Upgrading old kernel
On 4/15/20 11:40 AM, Rich Freeman wrote: On Wed, Apr 15, 2020 at 11:27 AM james wrote: It works fabulously, but it is time to upgrade, as most codes dependent on old software, have been migrated. So should I skip to a version 5 kernel? If so which one? I usually run hundreds of testing packages so maybe make the new system all testing? If you're more of the mindset of stability over features (as seems to be the case) then I'd stick with a longterm kernel. That means years of updates that basically shouldn't require anything more than running make oldconfig to deal with. Once in a VERY rare while a new option shows up. Traditionally yes, but not going forward. About 1/2 are on (going to be) the latest and I'll probably just default to every package being the latest testing, github or whatever version. You should be updating your kernel regularly to address security issues and other regressions. If you stay within the same major.minor series you shouldn't be getting anything other than bugfixes. Agreed, but most of my systems rarely have a route to the internet or are mostly not connected to any ethernet, continuously. I personally use the latest longterm, but not until it has been out for a few months. Mainly this is because I use zfs and don't want to deal with what versions of the one are compatible with what versions of the other. Yep, for the main system, but using btrfs with redundant drives. I'd like zfs, but not certain about it's future being open, open-source, etc. btrfs has bee great, for what I have done recently. Right now I'm on the 4.19 longterm, and I'm getting to the point where I'm contemplating switching to the 5.4 longterm. If I were in your shoes i'd be looking at 5.4 unless there is a reason not to. 5.4 sounds good. If you're asking how to actually compile/install/etc a kernel just follow the docs, but you should be doing this regularly. Jumping from 3.18 you're somewhat more likely to run into issues - your biggest headache though will be dealing with the 30,000 prompts you get from make oldconfig and making sure you set all the new options correctly. You won't get that problem going between two patch-level releases (eg 5.4.31 -> 5.4.32). Agreed. I was bad sick, off and on for 3 years. Rare blood sugar. 80% protein diet fixed it all. NO medications, no sugar very few slow carbs, finally. So, basically my mind was 80% erased. Good thing I kept notes and a myriad of sporadic 'howto docs'. Kernel hacking was void for 3 years. Now I feel GREAT and have many gentoo ambitions, 5G and embedded centric stuff; but also a mail and a web server, with very tight security. DNS primaries on little, ram intensive arm boards, are pretty sweet when combined with cloudflare's free, secure dns. Thank for all the help/ideas, James
Re: [gentoo-user] Upgrading old kernel
On 4/15/20 1:40 PM, Andreas Stiasny wrote: On 15.04.20 17:50, Rich Freeman wrote: Jumping from 3.18 you're somewhat more likely to run into issues - your biggest headache though will be dealing with the 30,000 prompts you get from make oldconfig and making sure you set all the new options correctly. That's why I use make olddefconfig in such a case. This takes all the old config values and uses the default for the new ones. If you know that you need one or more of the new config options you can fine tune them afterwards with make menuconfig. Andreas Ah. never used olddefconfig, I'll give it a spin.
Re: [gentoo-user] Upgrading old kernel
On 15.04.20 17:50, Rich Freeman wrote: Jumping from 3.18 you're somewhat more likely to run into issues - your biggest headache though will be dealing with the 30,000 prompts you get from make oldconfig and making sure you set all the new options correctly. That's why I use make olddefconfig in such a case. This takes all the old config values and uses the default for the new ones. If you know that you need one or more of the new config options you can fine tune them afterwards with make menuconfig. Andreas
[gentoo-user] Upgrading old kernel
Hello, So I have a gentoo system, with a 3.18.25 kernel. It works fabulously, but it is time to upgrade, as most codes dependent on old software, have been migrated. So should I skip to a version 5 kernel? If so which one? I usually run hundreds of testing packages so maybe make the new system all testing? Note: Not interested in using genkernel; prefer discrete, old-fashions method of understandable steps; but perhaps scripted... I run many old gentoo systems, from embedded hacks on 32 bit micros to AMD centric workstations (old but reliable). So, I really would like a system/guide that is general, but where I can add details for the various hardware/architectures/ issues. It seems like for 18 years, it's been a 'whatever reboots' incoherent system and I'm tire of it. I need structure and consistency, as I might not upgrade/install any system for months/years and then I need to do a dozen or more, not necessarily of the same hardware. AMD and ARM are what they are mostly, but other variants are in my collective. Hardware is like kids, it's hard for me to let go; ymmv. BTW, a guide that is BTRFS centric, would really be cool All discussion/suggestions are welcome, including comments on the links below. Is this the best guide to follow? https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/ or this one? https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Kernel/Upgrade https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Kernel and this I found this noob_simplified_doc: https://blog.khmersite.net/2019/01/upgrade-kernel-on-gentoo/ Really looking for input for one generalized guide that can have options for various hardware combos. curiously, James
Re: [gentoo-user] Upgrading old kernel
On Wed, Apr 15, 2020 at 11:27 AM james wrote: > > It works fabulously, but it is time to upgrade, as most codes dependent > on old software, have been migrated. > > So should I skip to a version 5 kernel? > If so which one? I usually run hundreds of testing packages so maybe > make the new system all testing? If you're more of the mindset of stability over features (as seems to be the case) then I'd stick with a longterm kernel. That means years of updates that basically shouldn't require anything more than running make oldconfig to deal with. Once in a VERY rare while a new option shows up. You should be updating your kernel regularly to address security issues and other regressions. If you stay within the same major.minor series you shouldn't be getting anything other than bugfixes. I personally use the latest longterm, but not until it has been out for a few months. Mainly this is because I use zfs and don't want to deal with what versions of the one are compatible with what versions of the other. Right now I'm on the 4.19 longterm, and I'm getting to the point where I'm contemplating switching to the 5.4 longterm. If I were in your shoes i'd be looking at 5.4 unless there is a reason not to. If you're asking how to actually compile/install/etc a kernel just follow the docs, but you should be doing this regularly. Jumping from 3.18 you're somewhat more likely to run into issues - your biggest headache though will be dealing with the 30,000 prompts you get from make oldconfig and making sure you set all the new options correctly. You won't get that problem going between two patch-level releases (eg 5.4.31 -> 5.4.32). -- Rich
Re: [gentoo-user] Two problems after switching to elogind
Peter Humphrey wrote: > Hello list, > > After the switch to elogind yesterday, chronyd now won't run. It complains > "Could not get user/group of ntp." I remerged chrony with USE=-ntp, but it > didn't help. I know that several people here use chrony, so what is your > experience? > > Secondly, this morning when I started firefox to listen to BBC Radio 3, as > usual, I had no sound. Then I remembered that alsa-utils was unmerged during > the switch to elogind yesterday, so I remerged it and ran alsamixer to unmute > the master. Still no sound. > > This box has two sound devices: > > # lspci | grep Audio > 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation C610/X99 series chipset HD Audio > Controller (rev 05) > 01:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Ellesmere HDMI > Audio [Radeon RX 470/480 / 570/580/590] > > The first of those is the one I use; the AMD device is part of the VGA card > and > not used. I'd have to get myself some kind of HDMI cable to split the sound > out if I wanted to use it. > > Should I assume that firefox is trying to use the AMD device? In that case, > how > do I redirect it? There's no sound configuration panel under multimedia in > KDE > system settings; only cddb. > I use chrony here and haven't ran into that problem, yet. Give me some time tho. ;-) As to the sound problem, I'd try logging out of the GUI, restarting elogind or rebooting, and then trying again. One thing I've noticed about elogind, if it or something it depends on triggers the need for a restart, it causes some weird problems. Once restarted, everything works as it should. Which brings me to this. Anyone know if moving elogind from the boot runlevel to default would cause problems? I'm thinking about doing that since I forget to restart elogind manually after a KDE upgrade, or other upgrades that require restarting a lot of services. Hope that helps. It seems elogind has a few quirks still, or maybe it is a feature we just don't want. ROFL Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Two problems after switching to elogind
On Wednesday, 15 April 2020 10:27:12 BST Peter Humphrey wrote: > Hello list, > > After the switch to elogind yesterday, chronyd now won't run. It complains > "Could not get user/group of ntp." I remerged chrony with USE=-ntp, but it > didn't help. I know that several people here use chrony, so what is your > experience? chronyd[3542]: chronyd version 3.5 starting (+CMDMON +NTP +REFCLOCK +RTC - PRIVDROP +SCFILTER -SIGND +ASYNCDNS -SECHASH +IPV6 -DEBUG) chronyd[3542]: Frequency -3.722 +/- 0.134 ppm read from /var/lib/chrony/drift .. chronyd[3542]: Selected source 123.456.78.90 As you can see mine is running with +NTP and I have no such problem. /usr/ sbin/chronyd runs as root, so I don't know why yours complains about ntp user/ group. # ps axf o user,group,pid,comm | grep chrony root root 3542 chronyd > Secondly, this morning when I started firefox to listen to BBC Radio 3, as > usual, I had no sound. Then I remembered that alsa-utils was unmerged during > the switch to elogind yesterday, so I remerged it and ran alsamixer to > unmute the master. Still no sound. I suspect this is not an alsa or Firefox problem. I have alsa-utils installed and did not have to reinstall it. However, I've been running with elogind instead of consolekit for a while now. Have a quick look here for some basic steps to check consolekit is removed and elogind is setup/switched to properly: https://marc.info/?l=gentoo-user=157293590710722=2 signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
[gentoo-user] Two problems after switching to elogind
Hello list, After the switch to elogind yesterday, chronyd now won't run. It complains "Could not get user/group of ntp." I remerged chrony with USE=-ntp, but it didn't help. I know that several people here use chrony, so what is your experience? Secondly, this morning when I started firefox to listen to BBC Radio 3, as usual, I had no sound. Then I remembered that alsa-utils was unmerged during the switch to elogind yesterday, so I remerged it and ran alsamixer to unmute the master. Still no sound. This box has two sound devices: # lspci | grep Audio 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation C610/X99 series chipset HD Audio Controller (rev 05) 01:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Ellesmere HDMI Audio [Radeon RX 470/480 / 570/580/590] The first of those is the one I use; the AMD device is part of the VGA card and not used. I'd have to get myself some kind of HDMI cable to split the sound out if I wanted to use it. Should I assume that firefox is trying to use the AMD device? In that case, how do I redirect it? There's no sound configuration panel under multimedia in KDE system settings; only cddb. -- Regards, Peter. Gentoo stable system, openrc-0.41.1 gcc 9.2.0, sys-kernel/gentoo-sources 5.4.28 QT 5.14.1, KDE frameworks 5.67.0, KDE plasma 5.17.5 KDE apps 19.12.3 incl KMail 19.12.3 (5.12.3), akonadi 19.08.3 dev-db/mariadb-10.2.29, net-libs/webkit-gtk-2.24.2 x11-drivers/xf86-video-amdgpu 19.0.1 Dev-libs/amdgpu-pro-opencl-19.30.838629
