Re: [gentoo-user] Re: separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 12:36:43AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote The actual problem is better stated something like this: In the early stages of user-land setup (around the time when udev is getting it's act together), arbitrary code can run and that code can be in any arbitrary place, but there is no guarantee that that code is even accessible at the point when it is needed. The actual cause of this mess is the lack of standards on where to put stuff on Linux systems, and it forms a classic bootstrap problem. There has only ever been one way around that problem - define an exact entry point that is guaranteed to be in a specific state. For current userland this effectively means that everything that has traditionally been in bin, sbin and lib in / and /usr must be available as step 1. Technically, you could include /var/lib/ and maybe even /opt in there. but we can safely exclude those at this time as only a brain-dead moron would ever put init-critical code there. Separate /usr worked for many years, even with udev. The question I have is why is udev *NOW* monkeying around with a whole bunch of additional stuff before mounting partitions? If you have an NFS-mounted /usr, I can see needing to have network services running first. Ditto for /usr being in an LVM or encrypted partition, you need LVM and/or decryption running first. There is no excuse for anything else breaking a separate /usr. Then again, separate /usr isn't the first thing Kay Sievers has broken since he took over udev, and I wouldn't be surprised if he one day just happens to break openrc... https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/10/2/303 From Linus Torvalds Date Tue, 2 Oct 2012 09:33:03 -0700 Subject Re: udev breakages - was: Re: Need of an .async_probe() type of callback at driver's core - Was: Re: [PATCH] [media] drxk: change it to use request_firmware_nowait() On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 6:03 AM, Mauro Carvalho Chehab mche...@redhat.com wrote: I basically tried a few different approaches, including deferred probe(), as you suggested, and request_firmware_async(), as Kay suggested. Stop this crazy. FIX UDEV ALREADY, DAMMIT. Who maintains udev these days? Is it Lennart/Kai, as part of systemd? Lennart/Kai, fix the udev regression already. Lennart was the one who brought up kernel ABI regressions at some conference, and if you now you have the *gall* to break udev in an incompatible manner that requires basically impossible kernel changes for the kernel to fix the udev interface, I don't know what to say. Two-faced lying weasel would be the most polite thing I could say. But it almost certainly will involve a lot of cursing. However, for 3.7 or 3.8, I think that the better is to revert changeset 177bc7dade38b5 and to stop with udev's insanity of requiring asynchronous firmware load during device driver initialization. If udev's developers are not willing to do that, we'll likely need to add something at the drivers core to trick udev for it to think that the modules got probed before the probe actually happens. The fact is, udev made new - and insane - rules that are simply *invalid*. Modern udev is broken, and needs to be fixed. I don't know where the problem started in udev, but the report I saw was that udev175 was fine, and udev182 was broken, and would deadlock if module_init() did a request_firmware(). That kind of nested behavior is absolutely *required* to work, in order to not cause idiotic problems for the kernel for no good reason. What kind of insane udev maintainership do we have? And can we fix it? -- Walter Dnes waltd...@waltdnes.org I don't run desktop environments; I run useful applications
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Sunday 29 Sep 2013 06:29:37 Walter Dnes wrote: On Sat, Sep 28, 2013 at 06:09:40PM -0500, Dale wrote Most likely, I'll install Kubuntu to start. Then I may roam around and test other distros until I find one I like. Thing is, I already have a starting point. I'm already looking. http://forums.funtoo.org/viewtopic.php?id=2265 and they also dislike systemd. I think I could get to like it. See also http://bugs.funtoo.org/browse/FL-34 Very interesting! This looks as a logical way to put udev back in its userspace box and stop it breaking the OS, or did I understand it incorrectly? -- Regards, Mick signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 29/09/2013 10:25, Mick wrote: On Sunday 29 Sep 2013 06:29:37 Walter Dnes wrote: On Sat, Sep 28, 2013 at 06:09:40PM -0500, Dale wrote Most likely, I'll install Kubuntu to start. Then I may roam around and test other distros until I find one I like. Thing is, I already have a starting point. I'm already looking. http://forums.funtoo.org/viewtopic.php?id=2265 and they also dislike systemd. I think I could get to like it. See also http://bugs.funtoo.org/browse/FL-34 Very interesting! This looks as a logical way to put udev back in its userspace box and stop it breaking the OS, or did I understand it incorrectly? Exherbo might be worth a look too[1]. It's a sort-of Gentoo fork using the portage tree and PMS; plus Ciaran strikes me as the kind of guy who *would* expend massive effort to find a way round current udev and systemd. [1] I didn't look myself. I have no idea what Exherbo's stance is on this matter. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
Bruce Hill wrote: On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 12:48:11AM -0400, Greg Woodbury wrote: To answer Alan's question - the main fault lies on the GNOME project and the forcing for systemd down user's systems throats. Additionally, as certina things were added to Linux to enhance capabilities, the GNOME developers (apparently) *deliberately* placed the programs in /usr/bin, instead of in the generally accepted place of /bin. Alan is correct - there is a deliberate cause of this debacle. Certain folks (Lennart being one of many) *are* cramming their vision of Linux on the whole community. I have read severl folks defending their ignoring of the old protocol of placing boot-required programs in /bin (and hence on root) as being holdovers from ancient history and claiming that disk space is so cheap these days that it isn't necessary to keep this distinction. As a result of the GNOMEish forcing, some distros have even gone so far as to *do away* with /bin - and have placed everything in /usr/bin with compatibility symlinks as a holdover/workaround. I lay this at the feet of GNOME, and thus, at the feet of RedHat. Linux used to be about *choice* aand leaving up to the users/admins about how they wanted to configure their systems. But certain forces in the Linux marketplace are hell-bent on imitating Microsoft's one way to do it thinking that they are outdoing the evil empire's evilness. I fully understand systemd and see that it is a solution seeking a problem to solve. And its developers, being nearly identical with the set of GNOME developers, are forcing this *thing* on the Linux universe. Certainly, the SystemV init system needed to have a way of *automagically/automatically* handling a wider set of dependencies. When we wrote if for System IV at Bell Labs in 1981 or so, we didn't have the time to solve the problem of having the computer handle the dependencies and moved the handling out to the human mind to solve by setting the numerical sequence numbers. (I was one of the writers for System IV init while a contractor.) OpenRC provided a highly compatible and organic extension of the system, and Gentoo has been happy for severl years with it. But now, the same folks who are thrusting GNOME/systemd down the throats of systems everywhere, have invaded or gained converts enought in the Gentoo structure to try and force their way on Gentoo. Gentoo may be flexible enough to allow someone to write an overlay that moves the necessary things back to /bin (and install symlinks from /usr/bin to /bin) so that an initrd/initramfs is not required. But I suspect that Gentoo and many distributions are too far gone down the path of deception to recover. Neil and other may disagree with this assessment, but I saw it coming and this is not the first time it has been pointed out - and not just by me. Who knows though? I may just have to abandon prepared distributions completely and do a Linux From Scratch solution, or fork some distro and tey to undo the worst of the damage. -- G.Wolfe Woodbury redwo...@gmail.com And that, folks, is the best and most accurate summary I've read to date. Thank you, sir, for stepping up to the plate. A friend of mine has his own Linux distro (has for a long time), and explained this to me some time ago. He's not effected by this. Bruce Name that distro please. ;-) Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 2013-09-29 08:06, Walter Dnes wrote: What kind of insane udev maintainership do we have? And can we fix it? By starting from scratch and putting it in the kernel (which will stop people from being too creative as well, since Linus will not allow things to break so easily). The BSDs, MacOS and Plan 9 kernels can do it[1], why not Linux? Well, one can wish at least... :-) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devfs#Implementations Best regards Peter K
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Sun, 29 Sep 2013 02:06:34 -0400, Walter Dnes wrote: for /usr being in an LVM or encrypted partition, you need LVM and/or decryption running first. Why would you want /usr encrypted but not /? There is nothing private in /usr, but /etc/ contains password files. I have used a separate usr in the past to do it the other way round, encrypted / but unencrypted /usr (to lower processor usage on a netbook) but that requires an initramfs anyway. -- Neil Bothwick Justify my text? I'm sorry but it has no excuse. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
Am 29.09.2013 10:28, schrieb Alan McKinnon: On 29/09/2013 10:25, Mick wrote: On Sunday 29 Sep 2013 06:29:37 Walter Dnes wrote: On Sat, Sep 28, 2013 at 06:09:40PM -0500, Dale wrote Most likely, I'll install Kubuntu to start. Then I may roam around and test other distros until I find one I like. Thing is, I already have a starting point. I'm already looking. http://forums.funtoo.org/viewtopic.php?id=2265 and they also dislike systemd. I think I could get to like it. See also http://bugs.funtoo.org/browse/FL-34 Very interesting! This looks as a logical way to put udev back in its userspace box and stop it breaking the OS, or did I understand it incorrectly? Exherbo might be worth a look too[1]. It's a sort-of Gentoo fork using the portage tree and PMS; plus Ciaran strikes me as the kind of guy who *would* expend massive effort to find a way round current udev and systemd. [1] I didn't look myself. I have no idea what Exherbo's stance is on this matter. why do you bring up udev and systemd AT ALL? They are not the problem or the reason why seperate /usr is prone to break.
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
Am 29.09.2013 02:08, schrieb Alan McKinnon: On 29/09/2013 01:23, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: It *really* is that simple. If you have a better solution than my last two choices, then I am all ears. the correct and simple solution would be to deprecate /usr and move everything into / . I did consider that, but gave up on the idea as not workable. Sure, it would work great and did work very well for Android and MacOS, both controlled environments. But doing it gains you nothing really apart from a crap load of stuff cluttering up /, thinks like local, games and share. But hey, maybe we can go right back to the originsl and put /home where it started: /usr/people and a cluttered / is worse than a non-existant / and a cluttered /usr? Because we are just moving in that direction.
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
Am 29.09.2013 01:31, schrieb pk: On 2013-09-29 01:23, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: the correct and simple solution would be to deprecate /usr and move everything into / . Install Windows and be done with it, I say. Best regards Peter K . look at history, think and retry.
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 09/29/2013 06:55 AM, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: why do you bring up udev and systemd AT ALL? They are not the problem or the reason why seperate /usr is prone to break. Except that systemd *is* why a seperate /usr is broken now. Parts of the libraries that systemd depend on we *deliberately* placed in /usr despite the fact that they are needed to bbring the system to an operational state. For *years* things required to boot the system were defined to be in the root file system, and items not required until after mounting had been accomplished were to be placed in /usr. BTW: There is a standard (The File System Hierarch Standard - FSS) that existed and described this behaviour. It was killed off by deliberate vendor refusals to support or adhere to it. In frustration, the folks involved simply gave up. -- G.Wolfe Woodbury redwo...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
Am 29.09.2013 13:03, schrieb Greg Woodbury: On 09/29/2013 06:55 AM, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: why do you bring up udev and systemd AT ALL? They are not the problem or the reason why seperate /usr is prone to break. Except that systemd *is* why a seperate /usr is broken now. Parts of the libraries that systemd depend on we *deliberately* placed in /usr despite the fact that they are needed to bbring the system to an operational state. For *years* things required to boot the system were defined to be in the root file system, and items not required until after mounting had been accomplished were to be placed in /usr. BTW: There is a standard (The File System Hierarch Standard - FSS) that existed and described this behaviour. It was killed off by deliberate vendor refusals to support or adhere to it. In frustration, the folks involved simply gave up. things were broken way before that. As much as I hate systemd, it is not the root cause of the problem. The problems were caused by people saying that seperate /usr was a good idea, so / would not fill up and similar idiocies. The problems were caused by people saying that lvm is a good idea - for desktops. Those people who are fighting against the kernel auto assembling raids are to blame too. Systemd is just another point in a very long list.
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
Hello, Neil. On Sat, Sep 28, 2013 at 11:37:50PM +0100, Neil Bothwick wrote: On Sat, 28 Sep 2013 21:09:38 +, Alan Mackenzie wrote: It's evolution. Linux has for years been moving in this direction, now it has reached the point where the Gentoo devs can no longer devote the increasing time needed to support what has now become an edge case. That's precisely the sort of patronising comment I was complaining of in my previous paragraph. In what way is it patronising? It talks down to people. It insinuates that the readers don't have the wherewithal to appreciate that they have been deliberately hurt by _somebody_ rather than something just happening; that the idea of an abstraction moving is any sort of justification for anything. It isn't evolution. It has been a decision of somebody to move it. Who? It hasn't been a single decision. Somebody, somewhere was the first person to decide to put early boot software into /usr. Others may have followed him, sooner or later, but there was a single person (or perhaps a conspiracy) that did this first. Who? There was no public discussion of this momentous change, not that I'm aware of. Why? No, this breaking of separate /usr was done by some specific project, some specific person, even, in a supreme display of incompetence, malice, or arrogance. How come this project and this person have managed to maintain such a low profile? There seems to have been some sort of conspiracy to do this breakage in secret, each member of the coven pushing the plot until the damage was irrevocable. Who was it? So which was it, one specific person or a coven of conspirators? This is open source, secret conspiracies don't really work well. If this really was such a bad move, do you really think the likes of Greg K-H would not have stepped in? Or is he a conspirator too? I know not how many people were involved. Don't you think it noteworthy that we on this group first learnt of the change when it had already happened? I have no idea whether people like GK-H would have been aware of it either. I think that is entirely the right time to learn of it. If you want to know about the devs' discussions before reaching the decision, you should read gentoo-dev. Until then it was a dev issue, now it is being implemented it is a user issue. Please be aware the change I was talking about was the decision to break separate /usr, not the Gentoo devs' reaction to this breakage. Why did we only become aware of the decision to break separate /usr after it was too late to do anything about it? How could such a thing happen, if not through conspiracy? It [creating an initramfs] may or may not be demanding for any particular administrator. It is undoubtedly tedious and time consuming. I disagree, but then I have actually tried doing it. I tried, and gave up after a couple of hours. It was a challenge, but I've grown out of being fascinated by challenges for their own sake. Then I installed dracut, only to find it won't work on my system. I haven't tried genkernel. In the end, with regrets, I took /usr out of my LVM area and put it into a new partition which became the root partition. This whole discussion reminds me of a conversation I had with a senior SUSE engineer earlier this year, someone of a similar age to myself. His comment was along the lines of I remember when Linux users wanted the latest bleeding edge, now they complain every time something changes. The particular change is not progress, it's not a new feature, it's not something useful for users. It's pure breakage for no good reason. If this is what bleeding edge now means, no surprise that people complain about it. -- Neil Bothwick A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance from Mom. -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 2013-09-28 8:30 AM, Bruce Hill da...@happypenguincomputers.com wrote: This does not mean that on November 1 your system will not be able to boot. Its simply means that beginning November 1, Gentoo devs are not required to jump through hoops to make apps work on systems with /usr separate from /. Now, what are you going to do? That's the question. This won't necessarily be the end of the worl, if, and ONLY if any and all ebuild mainteainers are REQUIRED to provide very large and scary warnings if they change something that will cause any systems with a separate /usr and NO initramfs to fail to boot. Anything else is pure sadism.
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 2013-09-28 9:15 AM, Michael Hampicke m...@hadt.biz wrote: Am 28.09.2013 13:32, schrieb Tanstaafl: On 2013-09-27 7:10 PM, Alan McKinnonalan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: No really,*why exactly*? Because that was the RECOMMENDED WAY IN THE GENTOO HANDBOOK when I first set this system up many years ago. Where did you read that? According to the 2004 handbook the default partition scheme was: Partition Filesystem SizeDescription /dev/hda1 ext232M Boot partition /dev/hda2 (swap) 512MSwap partition /dev/hda3 ext3Rest of the diskRoot partition http://web.archive.org/web/20040419042803/http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?full=1 While I'm fairly certain that it was in the LVM portion of the handbook (since that is what I was wanting to use), I really don't care what that link says. The fact is, when I installed this system, it was my very first gentoo system, and I am very methodical about these kinds of things, and there is absolutely no way on gods green earth that I would have opted for a separate /usr unless the instructions said to do it, whether as something that was mandatory, or maybe it only said it was preferred (to take advantage of the features of LVM)...
Re: [gentoo-user] Slow network transfers ... lost interrupts because of clocksource?
Am 27.09.2013 17:55, schrieb Volker Armin Hemmann: What direction to go? force or disable HPET? neither And what to do to avoid those lost interrupts?
[gentoo-user] gcc-bin for stupid user
I'm in trouble for having stupidly unmerged gcc and gcc-config ! What's the easiest way, if any, to grab and install a binary gcc allowing me to emerge... gcc ! We're talking about amd64.
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 2013-09-28 2:18 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Michael Hampicke wrote: No seperate /usr either Well, it was there when I followed it otherwise, I wouldn't have known to even do it. I all but copy and pasted the instructions from the install guide. I'm 99% certain it was in the LVM part of the handbook/guide. Dale - I'm honestly curious, what is your reason, philisophical or technical, for wanting a separate /usr? Everything I've read says there is no good reason for it today. Separate /home, /tmp, /var, yes, good reasons for t hose... but not /usr... So, again - why would you prefer switching distro's over merging /usr back into / and be done with it?
Re: [gentoo-user] gcc-bin for stupid user
On 29-Sep-13 16:44, Alain Didierjean wrote: I'm in trouble for having stupidly unmerged gcc and gcc-config ! What's the easiest way, if any, to grab and install a binary gcc allowing me to emerge... gcc ! We're talking about amd64. IMHO the easiest way is to restore system from backup. Jarry -- ___ This mailbox accepts e-mails only from selected mailing-lists! Everything else is considered to be spam and therefore deleted.
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 2013-09-28 3:04 PM, Alan Mackenzie a...@muc.de wrote: Hi, William. On Sat, Sep 28, 2013 at 11:01:59AM -0500, William Hubbs wrote: I have a pretty simple setup, but I have been using an initramfs which I built some time ago with genkernel and I barely know it is there. Until, after some update, it reminds you of its presence by not booting your machine. That's the sort of excitement I can do without. Precisely. And, it is my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong), that simply keeping your old kernel/initramfs around is NOT a guarantee (it might work - and it might NOT) of being able to fallback to a known working config until you figure it out. THAT, in a nutshell, is why my intention is to NEVER let one of those things on my systems.
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 2013-09-28 3:50 PM, Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk wrote: On Sat, 28 Sep 2013 20:11:06 +0200, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: To merge two filesystems, you just merge two filesystems. You don't rebuild anything. You might have some downtime though one reboot. You cp everything into /newuser. On shutdown you unmount /usr, mv newuser usr, sync, unmount, reboot. if you want to do it 'old fashioned', you cp everything to /newuser, reboot with systemrescuecd, mount / on /mnt/gentoo, my newuser to usr and reboot. Oh, and change fstab. It's not that simple if /usr is on LVM, Mine is / is not large enough to hold /usr But luckily, mine is - merging will leave about 5GB free (out of a total of 19GB for my / filesystem)... and resizing the partition is really tricky. In that case, the simplest option is to start using an initramfs. Once that is working, you can get rid of the separate root partition and move that filesystem into the VG too. Thanks, but I definitely don't want my / on LVM... ;)
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 10:20:49AM -0400, Tanstaafl wrote: On 2013-09-28 8:30 AM, Bruce Hill da...@happypenguincomputers.com wrote: This does not mean that on November 1 your system will not be able to boot. Its simply means that beginning November 1, Gentoo devs are not required to jump through hoops to make apps work on systems with /usr separate from /. Now, what are you going to do? That's the question. This won't necessarily be the end of the worl, if, and ONLY if any and all ebuild mainteainers are REQUIRED to provide very large and scary warnings if they change something that will cause any systems with a separate /usr and NO initramfs to fail to boot. The news item *IS* the warning. -- Happy Penguin Computers ') 126 Fenco Drive ( \ Tupelo, MS 38801 ^^ supp...@happypenguincomputers.com 662-269-2706 662-205-6424 http://happypenguincomputers.com/ A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail? Don't top-post: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_post#Top-posting
Re: [gentoo-user] gcc-bin for stupid user
2013/9/29 Alain Didierjean alain.didierj...@free.fr: I'm in trouble for having stupidly unmerged gcc and gcc-config ! What's the easiest way, if any, to grab and install a binary gcc allowing me to emerge... gcc ! We're talking about amd64. Did you check that solution: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-801985.html ? -- Regards, Alex
Re: [gentoo-user] gcc-bin for stupid user
On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 04:44:29PM +0200, Alain Didierjean wrote: I'm in trouble for having stupidly unmerged gcc and gcc-config ! What's the easiest way, if any, to grab and install a binary gcc allowing me to emerge... gcc ! We're talking about amd64. Did you unmerge all gcc, or upgrade and unmerge the version you were using? -- Happy Penguin Computers ') 126 Fenco Drive ( \ Tupelo, MS 38801 ^^ supp...@happypenguincomputers.com 662-269-2706 662-205-6424 http://happypenguincomputers.com/ A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail? Don't top-post: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_post#Top-posting
Re: [gentoo-user] gcc-bin for stupid user
Le 29/09/13 à 16:44, Alain Didierjean a tapoté : I'm in trouble for having stupidly unmerged gcc and gcc-config ! What's the easiest way, if any, to grab and install a binary gcc allowing me to emerge... gcc ! We're talking about amd64. Download a bin here : http://tinderbox.dev.gentoo.org/default-linux/amd64/sys-devel/
Flexibility and robustness in the Linux organisim (was: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01)
On 09/29/2013 07:58 AM, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: things were broken way before that. As much as I hate systemd, it is not the root cause of the problem. The problems were caused by people saying that seperate /usr was a good idea, so / would not fill up and similar idiocies. The problems were caused by people saying that lvm is a good idea - for desktops. Those people who are fighting against the kernel auto assembling raids are to blame too. Systemd is just another point in a very long list. The usr filesystem was separate from root from the very early days of UNIX. Disks were *tiny* (compared to today) and spreading certain things across separate spindles provided major benefits. Certainly, the original need to require a separate usr went away fairly quickly, but other benefits continued to encourage a seperation between root and usr. The var filesystem was for variable system data, and was never terribly big and its inclusion on the root volume happened. The home filesystem became traditionally separate because data expands to fill all availab;e space, and users collect *things* Networking made it possible to have home entirely off system, and diskless worstations ruled for a while as well. By the time Linux came along, it had become common for boot volumes to not be mounted during normal system operation, but the three filesystem layout was common and workable. As Linux continued to be like Topsy (she jest growed!) fragmentation started to occur as distributions arose. The balkanization of Linux distributions became a real concern to some and standardization offorts were encouraged. The File System Standard (FSS) was renamed to the Filesystem Hierarch Standard (FHS) and it was strongly based on the UNIX System V definitions (which called for seperation of usr and root.) POSIX added more layers and attempted to bring in the various BSD flavors. THe LSB (Linux Standards Base) effort was conceived as supersceeding all the other efforts, and FHS was folded into the LSB definition. Yet even then a separate root and usr distinction survived. Then things started falling apart again - POSIX rose like a phoenix and even the Windows/wintel environment could claim POSIX compliant behavior. The fall of the LSB effort really became evident when the FHS was gutted and certain major players decided to ignore the LSB recommendations. (Look out, there are some severely mixed metaphors coming and perhaps even some allegory Bear with it and you should get the gist of my accusations.) And now we are here. There is no clear definition of what comprises this OS that is a Linux kernel and a largely GNU based user-land. There are two major X-Windows based Desktop Environments and many less major DEs and Linux is seen as being locked in a struggle with the Microsoft OSs to win the hearts and minds of the Users. This is quite scary to many folks who depend on the success of Linux winning the so-called war. One of the camps bent on wining the war is GNOME. Despite much history and experience that shows that choice and freedom are NOT disadvantages, the mainline GNOME folks have charged ahead on their own in a direction that overrides user choice and seems bound and determined to outdo Microsoft at their own game. As a result, the GNOME Alliance has shattered. The main GNOME army marches on its unfathomable path, and various large chunks have broke off in their own directions (e.g. Cinnamon and Mate) seeking to remain flexible and not incompatible with the KDE and other lesser DE folks. It is truly layable at the feet of the GNOME folks, the breakage of the root and usr filesystem separability is all derived from the GNOME camp. These changes may not, in fact, be deliberate or intended to defeat Microsoft, but Ockham's Razor cuts and intentionality is the simpler explanation. I am NOT happy with the situation as it stands. Efforts that I have made on behalf of the FOSS and Linux/GNU are no longer serving to benefit me and the others with whom I thought I shared aspirations. I am an OS Agnostic/Atheist. I use what works to do what I need to do. My at-home network includes all four (or is that 3.5?) consumer OSes. I have spent quite a bit of effort to have them all work together, but forces seem to be in play that seem determined to win at all costs and enforce a computing monoculture. Such a result is not a good thing. As with biological systems, monocultures are more vulnerable to interference and disease. The evolution of differentiated organ systems in more complex (or higher) forms of life is driven by the need to provide robustness and continued operation in the face of unknown challenges. To come back to the thesis: robustness and flexibility are required for good health and we are witnessing a dangerous challenge. [PS} If anybody cares, I was trained in both Computer Science and Biological Science. and I can expand on
Re: Flexibility and robustness in the Linux organisim (was: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01)
On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 6:12 PM, Greg Woodbury redwo...@gmail.com wrote: On 09/29/2013 07:58 AM, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: things were broken way before that. As much as I hate systemd, it is not the root cause of the problem. The problems were caused by people saying that seperate /usr was a good idea, so / would not fill up and similar idiocies. The problems were caused by people saying that lvm is a good idea - for desktops. Those people who are fighting against the kernel auto assembling raids are to blame too. Systemd is just another point in a very long list. The usr filesystem was separate from root from the very early days of UNIX. Disks were *tiny* (compared to today) and spreading certain things across separate spindles provided major benefits. Certainly, the original need to require a separate usr went away fairly quickly, but other benefits continued to encourage a seperation between root and usr. The var filesystem was for variable system data, and was never terribly big and its inclusion on the root volume happened. The home filesystem became traditionally separate because data expands to fill all availab;e space, and users collect *things* Networking made it possible to have home entirely off system, and diskless worstations ruled for a while as well. By the time Linux came along, it had become common for boot volumes to not be mounted during normal system operation, but the three filesystem layout was common and workable. As Linux continued to be like Topsy (she jest growed!) fragmentation started to occur as distributions arose. The balkanization of Linux distributions became a real concern to some and standardization offorts were encouraged. The File System Standard (FSS) was renamed to the Filesystem Hierarch Standard (FHS) and it was strongly based on the UNIX System V definitions (which called for seperation of usr and root.) POSIX added more layers and attempted to bring in the various BSD flavors. THe LSB (Linux Standards Base) effort was conceived as supersceeding all the other efforts, and FHS was folded into the LSB definition. Yet even then a separate root and usr distinction survived. Then things started falling apart again - POSIX rose like a phoenix and even the Windows/wintel environment could claim POSIX compliant behavior. The fall of the LSB effort really became evident when the FHS was gutted and certain major players decided to ignore the LSB recommendations. (Look out, there are some severely mixed metaphors coming and perhaps even some allegory Bear with it and you should get the gist of my accusations.) And now we are here. There is no clear definition of what comprises this OS that is a Linux kernel and a largely GNU based user-land. There are two major X-Windows based Desktop Environments and many less major DEs and Linux is seen as being locked in a struggle with the Microsoft OSs to win the hearts and minds of the Users. This is quite scary to many folks who depend on the success of Linux winning the so-called war. One of the camps bent on wining the war is GNOME. Despite much history and experience that shows that choice and freedom are NOT disadvantages, the mainline GNOME folks have charged ahead on their own in a direction that overrides user choice and seems bound and determined to outdo Microsoft at their own game. As a result, the GNOME Alliance has shattered. The main GNOME army marches on its unfathomable path, and various large chunks have broke off in their own directions (e.g. Cinnamon and Mate) seeking to remain flexible and not incompatible with the KDE and other lesser DE folks. It is truly layable at the feet of the GNOME folks, the breakage of the root and usr filesystem separability is all derived from the GNOME camp. These changes may not, in fact, be deliberate or intended to defeat Microsoft, but Ockham's Razor cuts and intentionality is the simpler explanation. I am NOT happy with the situation as it stands. Efforts that I have made on behalf of the FOSS and Linux/GNU are no longer serving to benefit me and the others with whom I thought I shared aspirations. I am an OS Agnostic/Atheist. I use what works to do what I need to do. My at-home network includes all four (or is that 3.5?) consumer OSes. I have spent quite a bit of effort to have them all work together, but forces seem to be in play that seem determined to win at all costs and enforce a computing monoculture. Such a result is not a good thing. As with biological systems, monocultures are more vulnerable to interference and disease. The evolution of differentiated organ systems in more complex (or higher) forms of life is driven by the need to provide robustness and continued operation in the face of unknown challenges. To come back to the thesis: robustness and flexibility are required for good health and we are witnessing a
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
Tanstaafl wrote: On 2013-09-28 2:18 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Michael Hampicke wrote: No seperate /usr either Well, it was there when I followed it otherwise, I wouldn't have known to even do it. I all but copy and pasted the instructions from the install guide. I'm 99% certain it was in the LVM part of the handbook/guide. Dale - I'm honestly curious, what is your reason, philisophical or technical, for wanting a separate /usr? Everything I've read says there is no good reason for it today. Separate /home, /tmp, /var, yes, good reasons for t hose... but not /usr... So, again - why would you prefer switching distro's over merging /usr back into / and be done with it? . I didn't use LVM back then. I only started using LVM a few years ago. The reason is the same I have posted before. I have / and /boot on regular partitions. Everything else is on LVM. I don't have / on LVM because it would require a init thingy. I don't have /boot on LVM because grub doesn't or didn't support it. I have since switched to grub2 so it may but still have the issue with / so no need redoing everything for that. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 2013-09-29 12:59, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: look at history, think and retry. That's just what I did. Read and retry. Best regards Peter K
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
Tanstaafl wrote: On 2013-09-28 3:04 PM, Alan Mackenzie a...@muc.de wrote: Hi, William. On Sat, Sep 28, 2013 at 11:01:59AM -0500, William Hubbs wrote: I have a pretty simple setup, but I have been using an initramfs which I built some time ago with genkernel and I barely know it is there. Until, after some update, it reminds you of its presence by not booting your machine. That's the sort of excitement I can do without. Precisely. And, it is my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong), that simply keeping your old kernel/initramfs around is NOT a guarantee (it might work - and it might NOT) of being able to fallback to a known working config until you figure it out. THAT, in a nutshell, is why my intention is to NEVER let one of those things on my systems. . That is a point I have made a few times. If the init thingy fails and I can't get my system to boot, Gentoo isn't doing me a bit of good. I can't boot to get help to fix it and I'm not walking up the tall hill to my brothers to try and get help with his computer. With my health, that would be only one trip, two at best. A OS is no different than anything else around here that is broken, if it is broke and I can't fix it, I replace it. I have done it with appliances and several other things including cars. All of whcih costs a lot more money and such than any OS out there that I know of. I think I'll update that Kubuntu disk right quick while I am thinking about it. Fall back plan just in case. ;-) Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Sep 29, 2013 3:33 AM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: On 29/09/2013 10:25, Mick wrote: On Sunday 29 Sep 2013 06:29:37 Walter Dnes wrote: On Sat, Sep 28, 2013 at 06:09:40PM -0500, Dale wrote Most likely, I'll install Kubuntu to start. Then I may roam around and test other distros until I find one I like. Thing is, I already have a starting point. I'm already looking. http://forums.funtoo.org/viewtopic.php?id=2265 and they also dislike systemd. I think I could get to like it. See also http://bugs.funtoo.org/browse/FL-34 Very interesting! This looks as a logical way to put udev back in its userspace box and stop it breaking the OS, or did I understand it incorrectly? Exherbo might be worth a look too[1]. It's a sort-of Gentoo fork using the portage tree and PMS; plus Ciaran strikes me as the kind of guy who *would* expend massive effort to find a way round current udev and systemd. [1] I didn't look myself. I have no idea what Exherbo's stance is on this matter. Exherbo recommends installing systemd [1]. Sabayon installs systemd by default [2]. Funtoo is considering running GNOME =3.8 in a container so systemd doesn't impact the rest of the system [3] (which by the way looks like an interesting idea). However, in the same link Daniel Robbins says: [...] from my perspective, I think it is simply so people can run GNOME. I do like GNOME 3.6. I like their new UI. It would be nice to run 3.8. I don't care about systemd. It is simply a dep of GNOME. That is all. I see that as being open to the idea of using systemd in the future. It doesn't say that they'll never support systemd, as others would. Well, users; for the people that actually write the code, the majority seems to like systemd, or at least don't have a problem with it. Anyhow, many in this thread forget that it was the OpenRC maintainer the one that proposed the change to stop supporting a separate /usr without an initramfs. If you use OpenRC, and have a separate /usr without an initramfs, and *anything * breaks in your machine, you get to keep the pieces. No (official) support for you. It doesn't matter if you use udev, eudev (which is the same, just emasculated), nor mdev. OpenRC will start assuming an early available /usr; that's why its maintainer championed the change. It needs it to actually compete with systemd. So even Funtoo will need the same requirement, unless they switch to runit. As others have said, this is not really related to systemd/udev. It's OpenRC, the official and (still) recommended init system for Gentoo, the one that is making the change. And about time, if you ask me. Regards. [1] http://www.exherbo.org/docs/install-guide.html [2] http://www.sabayon.org [3] http://bugs.funtoo.org/browse/FL-674
Re: [gentoo-user] gcc-bin for stupid user
Alain Didierjean wrote: I'm in trouble for having stupidly unmerged gcc and gcc-config ! What's the easiest way, if any, to grab and install a binary gcc allowing me to emerge... gcc ! We're talking about amd64. I'm amd64 here. I could email you my backup copy. I keep binaries around just in case I need them. You may want to consider setting up make.conf to save them for you as well. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] gcc-bin for stupid user
On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 05:00:36PM +0200, netfab wrote: Le 29/09/13 à 16:44, Alain Didierjean a tapoté : I'm in trouble for having stupidly unmerged gcc and gcc-config ! What's the easiest way, if any, to grab and install a binary gcc allowing me to emerge... gcc ! We're talking about amd64. Download a bin here : http://tinderbox.dev.gentoo.org/default-linux/amd64/sys-devel/ DLing a binary is of course the quickest solution, but my first thought was (if I had no other system lying around) to download a stage3, chroot into it and run quickpkg. -- Gruß | Greetings | Qapla’ Please do not share anything from, with or about me with any Facebook service. You call this cappucino? It’s not even sprinkled with Parmesan!
[gentoo-user] Re: Flexibility and robustness in the Linux organisim
Am 29.09.2013 17:12, schrieb Greg Woodbury: On 09/29/2013 07:58 AM, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: things were broken way before that. As much as I hate systemd, it is not the root cause of the problem. The problems were caused by people saying that seperate /usr was a good idea, so / would not fill up and similar idiocies. The problems were caused by people saying that lvm is a good idea - for desktops. Those people who are fighting against the kernel auto assembling raids are to blame too. Systemd is just another point in a very long list. The usr filesystem was separate from root from the very early days of UNIX. Disks were *tiny* (compared to today) and spreading certain things across separate spindles provided major benefits. Certainly, the original need to require a separate usr went away fairly quickly, but other benefits continued to encourage a seperation between root and usr. in the very early days /usr did not exist in the first space and was only created because someone added a harddisk. Not really a good reason to keep it around. The var filesystem was for variable system data, and was never terribly big and its inclusion on the root volume happened. The home filesystem became traditionally separate because data expands to fill all availab;e space, and users collect *things* and a seperate /home does not create any problems. /var is much more prone to accidentally fill up then /usr ever was. Networking made it possible to have home entirely off system, and diskless worstations ruled for a while as well. By the time Linux came along, it had become common for boot volumes to not be mounted during normal system operation, but the three filesystem layout was common and workable. As Linux continued to be like Topsy (she jest growed!) fragmentation started to occur as distributions arose. The balkanization of Linux distributions became a real concern to some and standardization offorts were encouraged. The File System Standard (FSS) was renamed to the Filesystem Hierarch Standard (FHS) and it was strongly based on the UNIX System V definitions (which called for seperation of usr and root.) POSIX added more layers and attempted to bring in the various BSD flavors. THe LSB (Linux Standards Base) effort was conceived as supersceeding all the other efforts, and FHS was folded into the LSB definition. Yet even then a separate root and usr distinction survived. Then things started falling apart again - POSIX rose like a phoenix and even the Windows/wintel environment could claim POSIX compliant behavior. The fall of the LSB effort really became evident when the FHS was gutted and certain major players decided to ignore the LSB recommendations. too bad POSIX is much older than LSB or FHS. As a result, the GNOME Alliance has shattered. The main GNOME army marches on its unfathomable path, and various large chunks have broke off in their own directions (e.g. Cinnamon and Mate) seeking to remain flexible and not incompatible with the KDE and other lesser DE folks. It is truly layable at the feet of the GNOME folks, the breakage of the root and usr filesystem separability is all derived from the GNOME camp. These changes may not, in fact, be deliberate or intended to defeat Microsoft, but Ockham's Razor cuts and intentionality is the simpler explanation. that gnome is very hostile when it comes to KDE or choice is not news. And their dependency on systemd is just the usual madness. But they are not to blame for seperate /usr and the breakage it causes. To come back to the thesis: robustness and flexibility are required for good health and we are witnessing a dangerous challenge. what? that you need an initrd? That is so bad? Are you kidding me? [PS} If anybody cares, I was trained in both Computer Science and Biological Science. and I can expand on the parallels if so desired. no thank you. But if I might add one: you are making an elephant out of a gnat.
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
Am 29.09.2013 14:07, schrieb Alan Mackenzie: snipped everything because of stupid 'conspiracy' talk there was no conspiracy and there will never be one to break seperate /usr. In fact seperate /usr works just fine. You just need an initrd/initramfs. Other distros are using those for ages. So for them putting something 'essential' into /usr was no problem. It was not their fault that gentoo users hate this things so much. From REDHATs or SuSEs perspective seperate /usr is not a problem. Putting lvm/bluetooth/mdraid/whateverthefuckyoumightneed there was and is not a problem too. Thanks to initrdsco. They are using them for AGES and it works fine. See? No conspiracy needed. It just happened that YOUR use case of seperate /usr + no initrd has become so arcane and rare that pretty much nobody needs or wants to worry about fringe cases. Would you be fine with a 40% decrease in performance just to optimally support some 3 machines worldwide architecture? Certainly not. And that is not a conspiracy either. I dislike them, because they are another step to be taken on updates. But if I was so dumb to create a seperate /usr - well I wouldn't complain about the initrd and just go with the rest.
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
Am 29.09.2013 17:24, schrieb pk: On 2013-09-29 12:59, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: look at history, think and retry. That's just what I did. Read and retry. Best regards Peter K . I did, your mail did not make any more sense at all.
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Flexibility and robustness in the Linux organisim
Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: Am 29.09.2013 17:12, schrieb Greg Woodbury: On 09/29/2013 07:58 AM, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: things were broken way before that. As much as I hate systemd, it is not the root cause of the problem. The problems were caused by people saying that seperate /usr was a good idea, so / would not fill up and similar idiocies. The problems were caused by people saying that lvm is a good idea - for desktops. Those people who are fighting against the kernel auto assembling raids are to blame too. Systemd is just another point in a very long list. The usr filesystem was separate from root from the very early days of UNIX. Disks were *tiny* (compared to today) and spreading certain things across separate spindles provided major benefits. Certainly, the original need to require a separate usr went away fairly quickly, but other benefits continued to encourage a seperation between root and usr. in the very early days /usr did not exist in the first space and was only created because someone added a harddisk. Not really a good reason to keep it around. Nope, new reasons now. Good ones for me and quite a few others as well. The var filesystem was for variable system data, and was never terribly big and its inclusion on the root volume happened. The home filesystem became traditionally separate because data expands to fill all availab;e space, and users collect *things* and a seperate /home does not create any problems. /var is much more prone to accidentally fill up then /usr ever was. Happened to me twice since I started using LVM. I might add, it was one reason I started using LVM in the first place. I needed to be able to increase the size of file systems without redoing everything. LVM does that pretty well and has saved my bacon more than once. SNIP As a result, the GNOME Alliance has shattered. The main GNOME army marches on its unfathomable path, and various large chunks have broke off in their own directions (e.g. Cinnamon and Mate) seeking to remain flexible and not incompatible with the KDE and other lesser DE folks. It is truly layable at the feet of the GNOME folks, the breakage of the root and usr filesystem separability is all derived from the GNOME camp. These changes may not, in fact, be deliberate or intended to defeat Microsoft, but Ockham's Razor cuts and intentionality is the simpler explanation. that gnome is very hostile when it comes to KDE or choice is not news. And their dependency on systemd is just the usual madness. But they are not to blame for seperate /usr and the breakage it causes. If not, then what was it? You seem to know what it was that started it so why not share? To come back to the thesis: robustness and flexibility are required for good health and we are witnessing a dangerous challenge. what? that you need an initrd? That is so bad? Are you kidding me? For me, nope, I ain't kidding one dang bit. For me, I have used one before and it was a mess. It failed more times than I would care to think about so pardon me for NOT wanting to use one again. [PS} If anybody cares, I was trained in both Computer Science and Biological Science. and I can expand on the parallels if so desired. no thank you. But if I might add one: you are making an elephant out of a gnat. Maybe that gnat didn't bite you and give you some serious reason not to let it happen again. You worry about the elephant tho. :-D Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: Am 29.09.2013 17:24, schrieb pk: On 2013-09-29 12:59, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: look at history, think and retry. That's just what I did. Read and retry. Best regards Peter K . I did, your mail did not make any more sense at all. That could be the problem then couldn't it? Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Flexibility and robustness in the Linux organisim
El 29/09/13 18:03, Volker Armin Hemmann escribió: Am 29.09.2013 17:12, schrieb Greg Woodbury: On 09/29/2013 07:58 AM, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: things were broken way before that. As much as I hate systemd, it is not the root cause of the problem. The problems were caused by people saying that seperate /usr was a good idea, so / would not fill up and similar idiocies. The problems were caused by people saying that lvm is a good idea - for desktops. Those people who are fighting against the kernel auto assembling raids are to blame too. Systemd is just another point in a very long list. The usr filesystem was separate from root from the very early days of UNIX. Disks were *tiny* (compared to today) and spreading certain things across separate spindles provided major benefits. Certainly, the original need to require a separate usr went away fairly quickly, but other benefits continued to encourage a seperation between root and usr. in the very early days /usr did not exist in the first space and was only created because someone added a harddisk. Not really a good reason to keep it around. I'm going to show the lack of sense of this argument: in the very early days linux did not exist in the first space and was only created because someone got a 386. Not really a good reason to keep it around. in the very early days GNU did not exist in the first space and was only created because someone jammed a printer. Not really a good reason to keep it around. in the very early days Gentoo did not exist in the first space and was only created because someone added a processor. Not really a good reason to keep it around. in the very early days hardening did not exist in the first space and was only created because someone added security. Not really a good reason to keep it around. in the very early days Gnome did not exist in the first space and was only created because someone got a graphics card. Not really a good reason to keep it around. I'm sure you'll be able to figure out the pattern there. Ohh and BTW, /usr was not just added because someone added a harddrive, in most cases it was used to allow machines contain a very small system on / which was enough to just boot and mount a networked system (/usr) containing most of the software. This allowed for cheaper deployment of machines since the hard drive could be smaller as it wouldn't need to have all the data locally. Yeah, if this sounds familiar is because this was later moved to initramfs. The var filesystem was for variable system data, and was never terribly big and its inclusion on the root volume happened. The home filesystem became traditionally separate because data expands to fill all availab;e space, and users collect *things* and a seperate /home does not create any problems. /var is much more prone to accidentally fill up then /usr ever was. You are jst getting it wrong, /var was kept locally as the data there was supposed to change from machine to machine. Networking made it possible to have home entirely off system, and diskless worstations ruled for a while as well. By the time Linux came along, it had become common for boot volumes to not be mounted during normal system operation, but the three filesystem layout was common and workable. As Linux continued to be like Topsy (she jest growed!) fragmentation started to occur as distributions arose. The balkanization of Linux distributions became a real concern to some and standardization offorts were encouraged. The File System Standard (FSS) was renamed to the Filesystem Hierarch Standard (FHS) and it was strongly based on the UNIX System V definitions (which called for seperation of usr and root.) POSIX added more layers and attempted to bring in the various BSD flavors. THe LSB (Linux Standards Base) effort was conceived as supersceeding all the other efforts, and FHS was folded into the LSB definition. Yet even then a separate root and usr distinction survived. Then things started falling apart again - POSIX rose like a phoenix and even the Windows/wintel environment could claim POSIX compliant behavior. The fall of the LSB effort really became evident when the FHS was gutted and certain major players decided to ignore the LSB recommendations. too bad POSIX is much older than LSB or FHS. Too bad separate /usr is much older than initramfs. As a result, the GNOME Alliance has shattered. The main GNOME army marches on its unfathomable path, and various large chunks have broke off in their own directions (e.g. Cinnamon and Mate) seeking to remain flexible and not incompatible with the KDE and other lesser DE folks. It is truly layable at the feet of the GNOME folks, the breakage of the root and usr filesystem separability is all derived from the GNOME camp. These changes may not, in fact, be deliberate or intended to defeat Microsoft, but Ockham's Razor cuts and intentionality is the simpler explanation. that gnome
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 2013-09-29 18:36, Dale wrote: That could be the problem then couldn't it? Indeed. :-) Best regards Peter K
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 2013-09-29 10:57 AM, Bruce Hill da...@happypenguincomputers.com wrote: On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 10:20:49AM -0400, Tanstaafl wrote: On 2013-09-28 8:30 AM, Bruce Hill da...@happypenguincomputers.com wrote: This does not mean that on November 1 your system will not be able to boot. Its simply means that beginning November 1, Gentoo devs are not required to jump through hoops to make apps work on systems with /usr separate from /. Now, what are you going to do? That's the question. This won't necessarily be the end of the worl, if, and ONLY if any and all ebuild mainteainers are REQUIRED to provide very large and scary warnings if they change something that will cause any systems with a separate /usr and NO initramfs to fail to boot. The news item *IS* the warning. Oh for fucks sake... BULLSHIT. If an ebuild maintainer changes something that will BREAK BOOTING on systems that violate the 'no separate /usr without an initramfs' rule, what in the FUCK is the problem with requiring them to WARN PEOPLE?
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 2013-09-29 11:24 AM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Tanstaafl wrote: Dale - I'm honestly curious, what is your reason, philisophical or technical, for wanting a separate /usr? Everything I've read says there is no good reason for it today. Separate /home, /tmp, /var, yes, good reasons for t hose... but not /usr... So, again - why would you prefer switching distro's over merging /usr back into / and be done with it? The reason is the same I have posted before. I have / and /boot on regular partitions. Everything else is on LVM. I don't have / on LVM because it would require a init thingy. I don't have /boot on LVM because grub doesn't or didn't support it. I have since switched to grub2 so it may but still have the issue with / so no need redoing everything for that. Well, I don't see a *reason* to WANT to have /usr on a separate partition. I see only THE reason that you have it there NOW. Also, logically speaking, if the stated reason for not having / (or /boot) on separate LVM partitions is because it would require an init thingy, then why can't you simply add /usr to that reason? Again, I'm asking for why you WANT it on a separate LVM partition, not why it is there now. The way I see it, if y ou cannot provide a rational answer to that question, then there is no reason for you to use this as a reason to abandon gentoo, only a reason to merge /usr into /...
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 12:24 PM, Tanstaafl tansta...@libertytrek.org wrote: On 2013-09-29 10:57 AM, Bruce Hill da...@happypenguincomputers.com wrote: On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 10:20:49AM -0400, Tanstaafl wrote: On 2013-09-28 8:30 AM, Bruce Hill da...@happypenguincomputers.com wrote: This does not mean that on November 1 your system will not be able to boot. Its simply means that beginning November 1, Gentoo devs are not required to jump through hoops to make apps work on systems with /usr separate from /. Now, what are you going to do? That's the question. This won't necessarily be the end of the worl, if, and ONLY if any and all ebuild mainteainers are REQUIRED to provide very large and scary warnings if they change something that will cause any systems with a separate /usr and NO initramfs to fail to boot. The news item *IS* the warning. Oh for fucks sake... BULLSHIT. If an ebuild maintainer changes something that will BREAK BOOTING on systems that violate the 'no separate /usr without an initramfs' rule, what in the FUCK is the problem with requiring them to WARN PEOPLE? The news item allows developers to assume that /usr is available from early boot. Therefore, they *could* be breaking *some* setups, and they will not even realize it. That is the beauty of having /usr available from early boot: it frees developers from thinking in all kind of different setups and combinations (it is on LVM? it uses raid? what level? it's on NFS? do I need a special filesystem?), so they can work in bringing more awesomeness into Gentoo. They cannot put a warning if they don't know something will break *some* setups. And the whole point of this is that they don't have to consider every single possible combination of setups; the point is not to force you to have an initramfs. The point is to guarantee early /usr availability. Regards. -- Canek Peláez Valdés Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 2013-09-28 6:46 PM, Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk wrote: Except you can never break Gentoo with a kernel update because, unlike some other distros, installing a new kernel does not uninstall the previous one. No matter how badly wrng a kernel update goes, you can always hit reset then select the old one from the GRUB menu - reinstallation doesn't come into it. My understanding is that this is not true, and that a USERLAND update (LVM2, which I use, among them) can cause breakage that will cause the CURRENT kernel+initramfs to no longer boot. Is my understanding flawed? Totally side question: Anyone ever hear Linus' opinion of an initramfs being required to boot a system?
[gentoo-user] Re: Flexibility and robustness in the Linux organisim
On 2013-09-29 11:12 AM, Greg Woodbury redwo...@gmail.com wrote: It is truly layable at the feet of the GNOME folks, the breakage of the root and usr filesystem separability is all derived from the GNOME camp. Thanks for the excellent summary... and this explains a lot... It also doesn't surpise me, given my extreme loathing for GNOME for a very long time. And that in and of itself is enough reason to avoid Lennart and systemd like the plague that it/they is/are. I sure hope gentoo can find a way to avoid requiring systemd.
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 2013-09-29 8:07 AM, Alan Mackenzie a...@muc.de wrote: Please be aware the change I was talking about was the decision to break separate /usr, not the Gentoo devs' reaction to this breakage. Why did we only become aware of the decision to break separate /usr after it was too late to do anything about it? How could such a thing happen, if not through conspiracy? Even if this quote: 'nothing in politics happens by accident'? never really was spoken, it should have - because truer words were never spoken.
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 2013-09-28 10:04 AM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: On 28/09/2013 13:32, Tanstaafl wrote: This, combined with an intense (also maybe irrational) desire to avoid like the plague using an initramfs, is why this decision to FORCE me into a position of possibly having to break my system (either by a filed attempt at merging /usr into /, or a failed attampt at using an initramfs). No-one is forcing you to do anything, the news item did not say that. It says that if you do it, the devs will not support you and you are on your own. It also says that in the dev's opinion, the day when you can no longer support it either is probably not too far away The main thing about this that pisses me off is the lack of enough warning... one month? Really? One month to completely rebuild a server that has been running flawlessly for many years, just because someone doesn't like something that has been done for many years? First, it is not one month, it is much longer. We've all been whinging about the issue for most of this year. Oh, please... the last conversations about this were *only* with respect to udev. Claiming that issue/conversation/thread adequately serves as advance warning about this *new* ultimatum is disingenuous at best, and an outright LIE at worst. Two, why do you think you need to rebuild the entire machine? You don't need to do that just to merge two filesystems. To merge two filesystems, you just merge two filesystems. You don't rebuild anything. You might have some downtime though Right, I misspoke there, but something that seems trivial to one person may not be quite so trivial to another. I have *never* merged a critical filesystem on a critical server like this before. Please see the news item for what it actually is, not something else. I see it as an ultimatum that I *must* change a server that has been running flawlessly for years, or face breakage at some point in the NEAR future. I also view this as a potential 'shot across the bow' warning that systemd is coming and will be shoved down our throats, like it or not. Maybe it isn't, but judging solely by recent events, I think that is much more likely than not.
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 2013-09-28 6:36 PM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: So this brings us back to the essential technical problem that still needs to be solved on your machines: /usr needs to be available (and not only for BT keyboards) at the earliest possible opportunity - this is a technical constraint. To guarantee that, you need to either merge /usr with /, or use an initramfs to guarantee that /usr is available before anything else happens in userland. It*really* is that simple. If you have a better solution than my last two choices, then I am all ears. Ok, and if this is all true, I can accept it. But... Technically, you could include /var/lib/ and maybe even /opt in there. but we can safely exclude those at this time as only a brain-dead moron would ever put init-critical code there. I also have /var on a separate (LVM) partition. What I'm AFRAID of, is that some 'brain-dead moron' will, sometime in the future, arbitrarily decide that having a separate /var will *also* require an initramfs because some *other* brain-dead moron (who happens to have enough clout to shove their garbage down our throats)... then what is next /home? It seems to me like the more likely case is that someone somewhere wants to require BOTH systemd AND an initramfs in ALL cases, and this is just the first step in that progression.
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 2013-09-28 4:17 PM, Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk wrote: On Sat, 28 Sep 2013 19:04:41 +, Alan Mackenzie wrote: I suppose that what I am about to say isn't really relevant, but it is unfortunate over the past year that people blamed udev specifically for this. It is true that it does things that don't work if /usr isn't mounted, but eudev does as well, since it is basically the same code. Who else is there to blame? We are continually being told that a separate /usr is broken, as though this were some unfortunate act of insert your deity here, much like an earthquake. This gets patronising really quickly. (Please note, I'm NOT blaming you here. I appreciate that you're as much victim as Dale or me or anyone else round here.) It's evolution. Linux has for years been moving in this direction, now it has reached the point where the Gentoo devs can no longer devote the increasing time needed to support what has now become an dge case. So the solution is to give users one MONTH to prepare? Why not 6 months, or better, a year? What for gods sake is the rush??? Where are the links/pointers to the INTERNAL discussions of this decision? I seriously want to know. If gentoo devs are not willing to provide a 'paper trail' for how this decision was arrived at, and let others judge their decisions based on the merits of their arguments, then what does that say about their true motivations/intentions? Again, I don't have a problem necessarily with what is being decided (no separate /usr without an initramfs), my problem is with the implementation - giving us one MONTH before we can expect possible breakage with each and every update. The other HUGE thing that worries me, and has me seriously considering switching to FreeBSD NOW, is, maybe there really is a secret, underlying ulterior motive to force both systemd AND an initramfs for everyone in ALL use cases. If that is the case, then say so now, and give those of us who do not want this advanced notice, and I'll just plan on setting my gentoo box to never update on Nov 1, and start working on learning FreeBSD and if necessary, pay someone to help me migrate services to it. But before I do that, I guess due diligence demands that I now go to the FreeBSD support lists/forums (whatever they use) to confirm that FreeBSD does NOT and never WILL require an initramfs (preferably the reason being architectural differences in the kernel itself). Thankfully they have their own init system, so no worrying about systemd invading there... I hope...
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 2013-09-28 12:01 PM, William Hubbs willi...@gentoo.org wrote: There is no reason to rebuild your server; we aren't telling you you have to merge /usr into /. The only thing we are saying is that you will need to use an initramfs if you are going to keep them separate. Which, if you even bothered to read the words in the posts of the people who are pushing back on this so much as to their specific *reasons* that this is a problem, is the whole point... I am reasonably good at following instructions, but I am paranoid when it comes to researching before doing something that has even a remote potential for breaking one of my systems - and the horror stories I've read involving the whole initramfs deal just makes it clear that it is just one more single point of failure that has a very GOOD chance of breaking every time I upgrade my kernel or certain critical USERLAND tools (like LVM) (I do NOT use genkernel or dracut and I do NOT want to have to START using them), I update them manually, and I'm comfortable with that. I have said more than once in these threads that I do *not* have a philosophical (or other) reason for wanting to keep them separate, so, my ONLY other choice (if I want to stick with gentoo, which I do) is to merge /usr back into /. I've been told that this shouldn't be a big deal... while I am a (barely) passable linux sys admin - I am NOT a programmer, I do NOT know how to interpret vague boot errors or TRACE a process to see where or why it is failing (much less fix it if I could), so if something breaks badly, I'll be like a fish out of water...
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 01:24:25PM -0400, Tanstaafl wrote: The news item *IS* the warning. Oh for *Tanstaafl's* sake... *Tanstaafl*. If an ebuild maintainer changes something that will BREAK BOOTING on systems that violate the 'no separate /usr without an initramfs' rule, what in the *Tanstaafl* is the problem with requiring them to WARN PEOPLE? You show the smallness of your vocabulary by using profanity. And you show the shallowness of your *nix knowledge by replying with such nonesense. -- Happy Penguin Computers ') 126 Fenco Drive ( \ Tupelo, MS 38801 ^^ supp...@happypenguincomputers.com 662-269-2706 662-205-6424 http://happypenguincomputers.com/ A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail? Don't top-post: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_post#Top-posting
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 12:58 PM, Tanstaafl tansta...@libertytrek.org wrote: On 2013-09-28 4:17 PM, Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk wrote: On Sat, 28 Sep 2013 19:04:41 +, Alan Mackenzie wrote: I suppose that what I am about to say isn't really relevant, but it is unfortunate over the past year that people blamed udev specifically for this. It is true that it does things that don't work if /usr isn't mounted, but eudev does as well, since it is basically the same code. Who else is there to blame? We are continually being told that a separate /usr is broken, as though this were some unfortunate act of insert your deity here, much like an earthquake. This gets patronising really quickly. (Please note, I'm NOT blaming you here. I appreciate that you're as much victim as Dale or me or anyone else round here.) It's evolution. Linux has for years been moving in this direction, now it has reached the point where the Gentoo devs can no longer devote the increasing time needed to support what has now become an dge case. So the solution is to give users one MONTH to prepare? Why not 6 months, or better, a year? What for gods sake is the rush??? Where are the links/pointers to the INTERNAL discussions of this decision? I seriously want to know. If gentoo devs are not willing to provide a 'paper trail' for how this decision was arrived at, and let others judge their decisions based on the merits of their arguments, then what does that say about their true motivations/intentions? The discussion happened in [1], [2], and [3]. And in similar meetings and mailing lists since months ago. [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.project/2946 [2] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/meeting-logs/20130924.txt [3] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/88282 All has been made in the open; if you subscribed to gentoo-dev, or to genoo-project, you would know about this changes since months ago. Again, I don't have a problem necessarily with what is being decided (no separate /usr without an initramfs), my problem is with the implementation - giving us one MONTH before we can expect possible breakage with each and every update. How much time do you need? Six months? A year? The other HUGE thing that worries me, and has me seriously considering switching to FreeBSD NOW, is, maybe there really is a secret, underlying ulterior motive to force both systemd AND an initramfs for everyone in ALL use cases. If that is the case, then say so now, and give those of us who do not want this advanced notice, and I'll just plan on setting my gentoo box to never update on Nov 1, and start working on learning FreeBSD and if necessary, pay someone to help me migrate services to it. Read the discussion: the change was proposed by William Hubbs, the OpenRC maintainer. You know, the *other* init system? The change was backed by the council and, it seems, most Gentoo developers, many of whom doesn't use (and some don't like) systemd. No bogeyman here, no grand conspiracy. Read the logs. But before I do that, I guess due diligence demands that I now go to the FreeBSD support lists/forums (whatever they use) to confirm that FreeBSD does NOT and never WILL require an initramfs (preferably the reason being architectural differences in the kernel itself). Thankfully they have their own init system, so no worrying about systemd invading there... I hope... systemd, according to its author, will never support *BSD. Regards. -- Canek Peláez Valdés Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
Tanstaafl wrote: On 2013-09-29 11:24 AM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Tanstaafl wrote: Dale - I'm honestly curious, what is your reason, philisophical or technical, for wanting a separate /usr? Everything I've read says there is no good reason for it today. Separate /home, /tmp, /var, yes, good reasons for t hose... but not /usr... So, again - why would you prefer switching distro's over merging /usr back into / and be done with it? The reason is the same I have posted before. I have / and /boot on regular partitions. Everything else is on LVM. I don't have / on LVM because it would require a init thingy. I don't have /boot on LVM because grub doesn't or didn't support it. I have since switched to grub2 so it may but still have the issue with / so no need redoing everything for that. Well, I don't see a *reason* to WANT to have /usr on a separate partition. I see only THE reason that you have it there NOW. Also, logically speaking, if the stated reason for not having / (or /boot) on separate LVM partitions is because it would require an init thingy, then why can't you simply add /usr to that reason? Again, I'm asking for why you WANT it on a separate LVM partition, not why it is there now. The way I see it, if y ou cannot provide a rational answer to that question, then there is no reason for you to use this as a reason to abandon gentoo, only a reason to merge /usr into /... Simple, I have never had to resize / or /boot before. I have had to resize /usr, /var and /home several times tho. THAT is the reason. For me, it doesn't matter if it is rational to YOU or not. I am the one doing things on my puter not you or anyone else. If the init thingy fails, that will be me staring at a error message, not you. I hope that clears it up for you. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 2013-09-29 2:02 PM, Bruce Hill da...@happypenguincomputers.com wrote: You show the smallness of your vocabulary by using profanity. Rotflmao! Sometimes profanity actually serves a purpose. And you show the shallowness of your *nix knowledge by replying with such nonesense. Nonsense? Really? You're saying it is unreasonable to expect an ebuild maintainer to know if something in their package requires access to something in /usr at boot time?
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Sun, 29 Sep 2013 12:07:44 +, Alan Mackenzie wrote: Hello, Neil. In what way is it patronising? It talks down to people. It insinuates that the readers don't have the wherewithal to appreciate that they have been deliberately hurt by _somebody_ rather than something just happening; that the idea of an abstraction moving is any sort of justification for anything. That only applies if you start from the position that this is a deliberate action against users, it's not, it's just the way the Linux ecosystem has developed. You call my attitude patronising, but from my viewpoint your attitude is paranoid. Somebody, somewhere was the first person to decide to put early boot software into /usr. Others may have followed him, sooner or later, but there was a single person (or perhaps a conspiracy) that did this first. Not necessarily. It most likely happened that it happened the other way round, that and increasing amount of software already in /usr became important during early boot. Who? There was no public discussion of this momentous change, not that I'm aware of. Why? It was discussed to death on this list several times, going back at least a year. I think that is entirely the right time to learn of it. If you want to know about the devs' discussions before reaching the decision, you should read gentoo-dev. Until then it was a dev issue, now it is being implemented it is a user issue. Please be aware the change I was talking about was the decision to break separate /usr, not the Gentoo devs' reaction to this breakage. Why did we only become aware of the decision to break separate /usr after it was too late to do anything about it? How could such a thing happen, if not through conspiracy? Ignorance? Not paying attention? This comes as no surprise to those that read this list. Users of other distros aren't even affected by it as they have been using initramfs/initrds for many years. I disagree, but then I have actually tried doing it. I tried, and gave up after a couple of hours. It was a challenge, but I've grown out of being fascinated by challenges for their own sake. Then I installed dracut, only to find it won't work on my system. I haven't tried genkernel. In the end, with regrets, I took /usr out of my LVM area and put it into a new partition which became the root partition. Why didn't you try genkernel? That has been creating Gentoo initrds for longer than I have been using Gentoo. But things would be easier if the kernel supported LVM. This whole discussion reminds me of a conversation I had with a senior SUSE engineer earlier this year, someone of a similar age to myself. His comment was along the lines of I remember when Linux users wanted the latest bleeding edge, now they complain every time something changes. The particular change is not progress, it's not a new feature, it's not something useful for users. It's pure breakage for no good reason. If this is what bleeding edge now means, no surprise that people complain about it. The comment wasn't about early boot, I think we were talking abut Unity at the time, but it seems relevant. Now Unity fits in with your arguments, a single organisation developed it and sprang t upon their users without warning. The same is not true of the usr/initramfs situation. -- Neil Bothwick Would a fly without wings be called a walk? signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Managing multiple systems with identical hardware
I realized I only need two types of systems in my life. One hosted server and bunch of identical laptops. My laptop, my wife's laptop, our HTPC, routers, and office workstations could all be on identical hardware, and what better choice than a laptop? Extremely space-efficient, portable, built-in UPS (battery), and no need to buy a separate monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, camera, etc. Some systems will use all of that stuff and some will use none, but it's OK, laptops are getting cheap, and keyboard/mouse/video comes in handy once in a while on any system. Laptops are a good choice, desktops are almost dead out there, and thin clients nettops are just dead in the water for anything other than appliances and media servers What if my laptop is the master system and I install any application that any of the other laptops need on my laptop and push its entire install to all of the other laptops via rsync whenever it changes? The only things that would vary by laptop would be users and configuration. Could work, but don't push *your* laptop's config to all the other laptops. they end up with your stuff which might not be what them to have. Rather have a completely separate area where you store portage configs, tree, packages and distfiles for laptops/clients and push from there. I actually do want them all to have my stuff and I want to have all their stuff. That way everything is in sync and I can manage all of them by just managing mine and pushing. How about pushing only portage configs and then letting each of them emerge unattended? I know unattended emerges are the kiss of death but if all of the identical laptops have the same portage config and I emerge everything successfully on my own laptop first, the unattended emerges should be fine. Within those constraints it could work fine. The critical stuff to share is make.conf and /etc/portage/*, everything else can be shared to greater or lesser degree and you can undo things on a whim if you wish. There's one thing that we haven't touched on, and that's the hardware. Are they all identical hardware items, or at least compatible? Kernel builds and hardware-sensitive apps like mplayer are the top reasons you'd want to centralize things, but those are the very apps that will make sure life miserable trying to fins commonality that works in all cases. So do keep hardware needs in mind when making purchases. Keeping all of the laptops 100% identical as far as hardware is central to this plan. I know I'm setting myself up for big problems otherwise. Personally, I wouldn't do the building and pushing on my own laptop, that turns me inot the central server and updates only happen when I'm in the office. I'd use a central build host and my laptop is just another client. Not all that important really, the build host is just an address from the client's point of view I don't think I'm making the connection here. The central server can't do any unattended building and pushing, correct? So I would need to be around either way I think. I'm hoping I can emerge every package on my laptop that every other laptop needs. That way I can fix any build problems and update any config files right on my own system. Then I would push config file differences to all of the other laptops. Then each laptop could emerge its own stuff unattended. OK, I'm thinking over how much variation there would be from laptop to laptop: 1. /etc/runlevels/default/* would vary of course. 2. /etc/conf.d/net would vary for the routers and my laptop which I sometimes use as a router. 3. /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf under the same conditions as #2. 4. Users and /home would vary but the office workstations could all be identical in this regard. Am I missing anything? I can imagine everything else being totally identical. What could I use to manage these differences? I'm sure there are numerous files in /etc/ with small niggling differences, you will find these as you go along. In a Linux world, these files actually do not subject themselves to centralization very well, they really do need a human with clue to make a decision whilst having access to the laptop in question. Every time we've brain-stormed this at work, we end up with only two realistic options: go to every machine and configure it there directly, or put individual per-host configs into puppet and push. It comes down to the same thing, the only difference is the location where stuff is stored. I'm sure I will need to carefully define those config differences. Can I set up puppet (or similar) on my laptop and use it to push config updates to all of the other laptops? That way the package I'm using to push will be aware of config differences per system and push everything correctly. You said not to use puppet, but does that apply in this scenario? I'm slowly coming to conclsuion that you are trying to solve a problem with Gentoo that binary
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 2013-09-29 2:21 PM, Canek Peláez Valdés can...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 12:58 PM, Tanstaafl tansta...@libertytrek.org wrote: Where are the links/pointers to the INTERNAL discussions of this decision? I seriously want to know. If gentoo devs are not willing to provide a 'paper trail' for how this decision was arrived at, and let others judge their decisions based on the merits of their arguments, then what does that say about their true motivations/intentions? The discussion happened in [1], [2], and [3]. And in similar meetings and mailing lists since months ago. [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.project/2946 [2] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/meeting-logs/20130924.txt [3] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/88282 All has been made in the open; if you subscribed to gentoo-dev, or to genoo-project, you would know about this changes since months ago. Thanks very much for this... But it would be pointless for me to subscribe to dev, since 98% of it would go straigvht over my head. Again, I don't have a problem necessarily with what is being decided (no separate /usr without an initramfs), my problem is with the implementation - giving us one MONTH before we can expect possible breakage with each and every update. How much time do you need? Six months? A year? Either one would be MUCH better than ONE month... systemd, according to its author, will never support *BSD. Thank god for small miracles...
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Sun, 29 Sep 2013 10:53:26 -0400, Tanstaafl wrote: Precisely. And, it is my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong), that simply keeping your old kernel/initramfs around is NOT a guarantee (it might work - and it might NOT) of being able to fallback to a known working config until you figure it out. Installing a new kernel does not magically make the old one break. If that kernel worked yesterday, it will work today. -- Neil Bothwick Your lack of organisation does not represent an emergency in my world. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Managing multiple systems with identical hardware
I'm slowly coming to conclsuion that you are trying to solve a problem with Gentoo that binary distros already solved a very long time ago. You are forcing yourself to become the sole maintainer of GrantOS and do all the heavy lifting of packaging. But, Mint and friends already did all that work already and frankly, they are much better at it than you or I. I think it will work if I can find a way to manage the few differences above. Am I overlooking any potential issues? I think Grant Should look at CFengine, if he is not familar with it. It is the traditional 800 pound Gorrilla when it comes to managing many systems. Surely there are folks there in those forums that can help Grant filter his ideas until they are ready for action. CFengine is in portage. Alan may be right, as CFengine (or whatever) may work better with a binary distribution and is probable more tightly integrated with something like debian or such OSes. Can you give me a general idea of how my workflow might be with a solution like that? - Grant
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Sat, 28 Sep 2013 18:09:40 -0500, Dale wrote: Read the kernel docs on initramfs, you'll then understand that this is not true. Point is, they are the same to me. Both stand between grub and the kernel and add yet one more point of failure. I'm not going to nitpck on the difference between them since I view both in the same way. They are not the same. Your stating that they are the same to you is effectively saying I know what I believe, don't bother me with the real facts. Except you can never break Gentoo with a kernel update because, unlike some other distros, installing a new kernel does not uninstall the previous one. No matter how badly wrng a kernel update goes, you can always hit reset then select the old one from the GRUB menu - reinstallation doesn't come into it. Provided that the old one works tho right? What if I update and it breaks more than one thing? Then what? That's got nothing to do with the kernel, initramfs or separate /usr. Once init is running, all that is history, it's done its job. If something subsequently fails, it has nothing to do with mounting / and /usr (which is all the initramfs does). This isn't even as close as comparing apples and oranges. To ME, a init thingy is a init thingy. That's why I call them all init thingys. To ME, both are apples. One may be green and another red but both are still apples. Please, don't ever offer to feed me :-) -- Neil Bothwick Computer apathy error: don't bother striking any key. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 01:25:56PM -0500, Dale wrote: Tanstaafl wrote: The way I see it, if y ou cannot provide a rational answer to that question, then there is no reason for you to use this as a reason to abandon gentoo, only a reason to merge /usr into /... Simple, I have never had to resize / or /boot before. I have had to resize /usr, /var and /home several times tho. THAT is the reason. For me, it doesn't matter if it is rational to YOU or not. I am the one doing things on my puter not you or anyone else. If the init thingy fails, that will be me staring at a error message, not you. I hope that clears it up for you. Dale Most eloquently sir! -- Happy Penguin Computers ') 126 Fenco Drive ( \ Tupelo, MS 38801 ^^ supp...@happypenguincomputers.com 662-269-2706 662-205-6424 http://happypenguincomputers.com/ A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail? Don't top-post: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_post#Top-posting
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 2013-09-29 2:25 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Tanstaafl wrote: The way I see it, if you cannot provide a rational answer to that question, then there is no reason for you to use this as a reason to abandon gentoo, only a reason to merge /usr into /... Simple, I have never had to resize / or /boot before. I have had to resize /usr, /var and /home several times tho. THAT is the reason. Ok, but... everything I've read and personal experience over the years shows that space required for /usr should not change much, especially constantly grow over time (like requirements for /home can and will)- it may fluctuate (increase, decrease) *a little* over time, but it definitely should not grow substantially, so, if you had to resize it, most likely it is because you simply didn't allocate enough room to start with. For me, it doesn't matter if it is rational to YOU or not. Sorry, but rationality is not subjective. Just because something seems to be rational to you doesn't mean that it is. You have still not stated a logical, rational reason for wanting a separate /usr. I am the one doing things on my puter not you or anyone else. If the init thingy fails, that will be me staring at a error message, not you. I don't want one of those things either, but that isn't what I was questioning you about. Of course you can do whatever you want *and* are technically capable of on your own computer, but that doesn't automatically make those things logical or rational. I did see one good case for a separate /usr (someone who was using ancient PATA drives, and something about striping for performance), but that was obviously a corner case...
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Sun, 29 Sep 2013 07:03:30 -0400, Greg Woodbury wrote: Except that systemd *is* why a seperate /usr is broken now. If that were true, the news item that started this thread would never have been published. Gentoo uses openrc by default, so supporting separate /usr on non-systemd systems (the majority) would be no problem. If your assertion were true, all that would be needed would be an ewarn about separate /usr hen installing systemd. -- Neil Bothwick IBM - Incredibly Bastardized Multitasking... signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Sun, 29 Sep 2013 13:43:10 -0400, Tanstaafl wrote: Except you can never break Gentoo with a kernel update because, unlike some other distros, installing a new kernel does not uninstall the previous one. No matter how badly wrng a kernel update goes, you can always hit reset then select the old one from the GRUB menu - reinstallation doesn't come into it. My understanding is that this is not true, and that a USERLAND update (LVM2, which I use, among them) can cause breakage that will cause the CURRENT kernel+initramfs to no longer boot. Is my understanding flawed? I would say so. Unless you change the LVM metadata in such a way that the tools in the initramfs cannt read it, I don't see how this can happen. And you'd have to recreates your LVs for that to occur. Totally side question: Anyone ever hear Linus' opinion of an initramfs being required to boot a system? I suppose the fact that his kernel includes an initramfs and always tries to load it when booting, and that there isn't even an option to disable this behaviour, gives a good indication of his feelings towards the idea of an initramfs. -- Neil Bothwick Q. What is the difference between Queensland and yoghurt? A. Yoghurt has an active culture. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 01:55:49PM -0400, Tanstaafl wrote: On 2013-09-28 6:36 PM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: So this brings us back to the essential technical problem that still needs to be solved on your machines: /usr needs to be available (and not only for BT keyboards) at the earliest possible opportunity - this is a technical constraint. To guarantee that, you need to either merge /usr with /, or use an initramfs to guarantee that /usr is available before anything else happens in userland. It*really* is that simple. If you have a better solution than my last two choices, then I am all ears. Ok, and if this is all true, I can accept it. Alan, this is a very good summary of the issues involved. Everyone on the list should go and read flameeyes' blog post then this summary. Tanstaaf, I am the OpenRC author/maintainer and a member of base-system. I can tell you that we are not discussing forcing systemd on everyone in Gentoo Linux as a default init system. I can also tell you that I am not aware of the Gentoo systemd team discussing this. Even if they were, a distro-wide change like this would have to be brought before the Council. William signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Managing multiple systems with identical hardware
On Sun, 29 Sep 2013 11:31:17 -0700, Grant wrote: Personally, I wouldn't do the building and pushing on my own laptop, that turns me inot the central server and updates only happen when I'm in the office. I'd use a central build host and my laptop is just another client. Not all that important really, the build host is just an address from the client's point of view I don't think I'm making the connection here. The central server can't do any unattended building and pushing, correct? So I would need to be around either way I think. If you ran the central server in a VM, you could have it run emerge --sync emerge -uDN @world from cron. You could do this without a VM, but a VM allows you to take snapshots before each sync/build cycle, so that you can roll back if an update breaks it. -- Neil Bothwick The severity of the itch is inversely proportional to the reach. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 01:21:30PM -0500, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote: On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 12:58 PM, Tanstaafl tansta...@libertytrek.org wrote: On 2013-09-28 4:17 PM, Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk wrote: On Sat, 28 Sep 2013 19:04:41 +, Alan Mackenzie wrote: I suppose that what I am about to say isn't really relevant, but it is unfortunate over the past year that people blamed udev specifically for this. It is true that it does things that don't work if /usr isn't mounted, but eudev does as well, since it is basically the same code. Who else is there to blame? We are continually being told that a separate /usr is broken, as though this were some unfortunate act of insert your deity here, much like an earthquake. This gets patronising really quickly. (Please note, I'm NOT blaming you here. I appreciate that you're as much victim as Dale or me or anyone else round here.) It's evolution. Linux has for years been moving in this direction, now it has reached the point where the Gentoo devs can no longer devote the increasing time needed to support what has now become an dge case. So the solution is to give users one MONTH to prepare? Why not 6 months, or better, a year? What for gods sake is the rush??? Where are the links/pointers to the INTERNAL discussions of this decision? I seriously want to know. If gentoo devs are not willing to provide a 'paper trail' for how this decision was arrived at, and let others judge their decisions based on the merits of their arguments, then what does that say about their true motivations/intentions? The discussion happened in [1], [2], and [3]. And in similar meetings and mailing lists since months ago. [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.project/2946 [2] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/meeting-logs/20130924.txt [3] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/88282 You forgot [4]. [4] http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/gentoo/dev/235575 I was actually against it initially. After reading and understanding where the linux ecosystem is going, my position evolved to support it. William signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 29/09/2013 12:55, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: Am 29.09.2013 10:28, schrieb Alan McKinnon: On 29/09/2013 10:25, Mick wrote: On Sunday 29 Sep 2013 06:29:37 Walter Dnes wrote: On Sat, Sep 28, 2013 at 06:09:40PM -0500, Dale wrote Most likely, I'll install Kubuntu to start. Then I may roam around and test other distros until I find one I like. Thing is, I already have a starting point. I'm already looking. http://forums.funtoo.org/viewtopic.php?id=2265 and they also dislike systemd. I think I could get to like it. See also http://bugs.funtoo.org/browse/FL-34 Very interesting! This looks as a logical way to put udev back in its userspace box and stop it breaking the OS, or did I understand it incorrectly? Exherbo might be worth a look too[1]. It's a sort-of Gentoo fork using the portage tree and PMS; plus Ciaran strikes me as the kind of guy who *would* expend massive effort to find a way round current udev and systemd. [1] I didn't look myself. I have no idea what Exherbo's stance is on this matter. why do you bring up udev and systemd AT ALL? They are not the problem or the reason why seperate /usr is prone to break. I fell victim to the sheer amount of fud around systemd and udev and typed without thinking enough. s/current udev and systemd/the root cause/g -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 29/09/2013 13:58, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: Am 29.09.2013 13:03, schrieb Greg Woodbury: On 09/29/2013 06:55 AM, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: why do you bring up udev and systemd AT ALL? They are not the problem or the reason why seperate /usr is prone to break. Except that systemd *is* why a seperate /usr is broken now. Parts of the libraries that systemd depend on we *deliberately* placed in /usr despite the fact that they are needed to bbring the system to an operational state. For *years* things required to boot the system were defined to be in the root file system, and items not required until after mounting had been accomplished were to be placed in /usr. BTW: There is a standard (The File System Hierarch Standard - FSS) that existed and described this behaviour. It was killed off by deliberate vendor refusals to support or adhere to it. In frustration, the folks involved simply gave up. things were broken way before that. As much as I hate systemd, it is not the root cause of the problem. The problems were caused by people saying that seperate /usr was a good idea, so / would not fill up and similar idiocies. The problems were caused by people saying that lvm is a good idea - for desktops. Those people who are fighting against the kernel auto assembling raids are to blame too. Systemd is just another point in a very long list. Volker, we agree. The problem as I see it is that we have an artificial, arbitrary separation between boot time stuff and something that happens later stuff. There is no clear definition of what these things are and the only real technical criteria advanced thus far is quoted above: after mounting had been accomplished That worked in the 80s when SysV came out. But times move on, new methods and hardware were developed and computing is now a very different beast to what it was 30 years ago. Nowadays we have a boatload of actions that can/may be needed to happen before fstab can be read to mount the rest of the system. /usr has become, whether we like it or not, an indespensable part of the userland start up process, and the only way out of this is to have some guarantees in place. We already have a perfectly good one - the root file system is guaranteed to be mounted by the kernel before init is called. If that filesystem does not contain /usr then a rather sophisticated hack is available to ensure that /usr is available, and it is an initramfs. I do beleive the choice really is that clear - provide that guarantee or be stuck forever with old code, hardware and methods. Just because SysV worked well for ages does not mean it's rules must persist through time. Everything changes in this worls, and our game changes faster than most other things. Let's not cling to sacred cows when the world has observably moved on. None of this means I think systemd is good (or bad). Maybe it's over-engineered, but at least someone has the balls to stand up and try deal with the actual problem. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 2:11 PM, William Hubbs willi...@gentoo.org wrote: On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 01:21:30PM -0500, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote: On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 12:58 PM, Tanstaafl tansta...@libertytrek.org wrote: On 2013-09-28 4:17 PM, Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk wrote: On Sat, 28 Sep 2013 19:04:41 +, Alan Mackenzie wrote: I suppose that what I am about to say isn't really relevant, but it is unfortunate over the past year that people blamed udev specifically for this. It is true that it does things that don't work if /usr isn't mounted, but eudev does as well, since it is basically the same code. Who else is there to blame? We are continually being told that a separate /usr is broken, as though this were some unfortunate act of insert your deity here, much like an earthquake. This gets patronising really quickly. (Please note, I'm NOT blaming you here. I appreciate that you're as much victim as Dale or me or anyone else round here.) It's evolution. Linux has for years been moving in this direction, now it has reached the point where the Gentoo devs can no longer devote the increasing time needed to support what has now become an dge case. So the solution is to give users one MONTH to prepare? Why not 6 months, or better, a year? What for gods sake is the rush??? Where are the links/pointers to the INTERNAL discussions of this decision? I seriously want to know. If gentoo devs are not willing to provide a 'paper trail' for how this decision was arrived at, and let others judge their decisions based on the merits of their arguments, then what does that say about their true motivations/intentions? The discussion happened in [1], [2], and [3]. And in similar meetings and mailing lists since months ago. [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.project/2946 [2] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/meeting-logs/20130924.txt [3] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/88282 You forgot [4]. [4] http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/gentoo/dev/235575 I was actually against it initially. After reading and understanding where the linux ecosystem is going, my position evolved to support it. Thanks for the link, William, and for all the work you have done to bring Gentoo to modern standards. Regards. -- Canek Peláez Valdés Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 10:34 PM, Canek Peláez Valdés can...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 2:11 PM, William Hubbs willi...@gentoo.org wrote: On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 01:21:30PM -0500, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote: On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 12:58 PM, Tanstaafl tansta...@libertytrek.org wrote: On 2013-09-28 4:17 PM, Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk wrote: On Sat, 28 Sep 2013 19:04:41 +, Alan Mackenzie wrote: I suppose that what I am about to say isn't really relevant, but it is unfortunate over the past year that people blamed udev specifically for this. It is true that it does things that don't work if /usr isn't mounted, but eudev does as well, since it is basically the same code. Who else is there to blame? We are continually being told that a separate /usr is broken, as though this were some unfortunate act of insert your deity here, much like an earthquake. This gets patronising really quickly. (Please note, I'm NOT blaming you here. I appreciate that you're as much victim as Dale or me or anyone else round here.) It's evolution. Linux has for years been moving in this direction, now it has reached the point where the Gentoo devs can no longer devote the increasing time needed to support what has now become an dge case. So the solution is to give users one MONTH to prepare? Why not 6 months, or better, a year? What for gods sake is the rush??? Where are the links/pointers to the INTERNAL discussions of this decision? I seriously want to know. If gentoo devs are not willing to provide a 'paper trail' for how this decision was arrived at, and let others judge their decisions based on the merits of their arguments, then what does that say about their true motivations/intentions? The discussion happened in [1], [2], and [3]. And in similar meetings and mailing lists since months ago. [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.project/2946 [2] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/meeting-logs/20130924.txt [3] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/88282 You forgot [4]. [4] http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/gentoo/dev/235575 I was actually against it initially. After reading and understanding where the linux ecosystem is going, my position evolved to support it. Thanks for the link, William, and for all the work you have done to bring Gentoo to modern standards. modern = what enforced by udev (aka systemd)? Regards. -- Canek Peláez Valdés Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Flexibility and robustness in the Linux organisim
On 29/09/2013 18:33, Dale wrote: that gnome is very hostile when it comes to KDE or choice is not news. And their dependency on systemd is just the usual madness. But they are not to blame for seperate /usr and the breakage it causes. If not, then what was it? You seem to know what it was that started it so why not share? He already said it. Someone added a hard disk to a PDP-9 (or was it an 11?) Literally. It all traces back to that. In those days there was no such thing as volume management or raid. If you added a (seriously expensive) disk the only feasible way to get it's storage in the system was to mount it as a separate volume. From that one single action this entire mess of separate /usr arose as folks discovered more and more reasons to consider it good and keep it around -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
[gentoo-user] systemd installation location
All, I can clarify one part of the systemd issue, because I have been involved in this part of the issue for months. Again, I am not trying to start a dispute here, just providing a clarification. The choice to install all of the systemd binaries in /usr is not an upstream choice. It was a choice made a year ago when our systemd team was one person [1], and now the team doesn't want to change it because it would require users to go through a migration, and the rest of the team doesn't see a benefit in changing it since it still links to libraries in /usr/lib. I joined the team, primarily to take responsibility for this change and to try to make it go as smoothly as possible, but I was overruled even though upstream gave us a pretty strong warning about it. William [1] http://blogs.gentoo.org/mgorny/2012/01/04/moving-systemd-into-usr-the-technical-side/ signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: [gentoo-user] gcc-bin for stupid user
On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 04:44:29PM +0200, Alain Didierjean wrote: I'm in trouble for having stupidly unmerged gcc and gcc-config ! What's the easiest way, if any, to grab and install a binary gcc allowing me to emerge... gcc ! We're talking about amd64. I don't know if you solved your issue, or exactly what you have, but this weekend's gcc-4.7 move to stable caused me to have to: gcc-config x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-4.7.3 . /etc/profile Now it's all good. -- Happy Penguin Computers ') 126 Fenco Drive ( \ Tupelo, MS 38801 ^^ supp...@happypenguincomputers.com 662-269-2706 662-205-6424 http://happypenguincomputers.com/ A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail? Don't top-post: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_post#Top-posting
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 29/09/2013 19:43, Tanstaafl wrote: On 2013-09-28 6:46 PM, Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk wrote: Except you can never break Gentoo with a kernel update because, unlike some other distros, installing a new kernel does not uninstall the previous one. No matter how badly wrng a kernel update goes, you can always hit reset then select the old one from the GRUB menu - reinstallation doesn't come into it. My understanding is that this is not true, and that a USERLAND update (LVM2, which I use, among them) can cause breakage that will cause the CURRENT kernel+initramfs to no longer boot. Is my understanding flawed? No, this can happen in theory. It's quite simple to describe in somewhat abstract terms: Imagine for example that LVM makes a backwards-incompatible change to it's metadata. You are warned about this and take care to update your kernel so that it can deal with the new metadata by including support for both formats. And you forget to update the initramfs. Reboot. Oops. This is merely highly inconvenient, not the end of the world. Download a very recent rescue disk on another computer and boot with that to effect the repair. Then leave work and make your local publican's day whilst you vent your fury yet again Point is, this is not a situation unique to kernels, userlands and initramfs. That kind of error can occur in so many different ways (eg deploy a seriously broken linker and loader, or simply uninstall bash on a RHEL4 host), it's just that when it happens in the circumstances you ask about, it's one of the most inconvenient errors in a huge list. This is why we sysadmins have jobs - we are supposed to have subtantial clue and be able to predict and avoid such goofs. Totally side question: Anyone ever hear Linus' opinion of an initramfs being required to boot a system? Never read it myself, but I'll hazard a guess: He detests it with a passion calling it a grotesque hack, but tolerates it because binary distros need it and no-one has come up with something better (i.e. it sucks less)? -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 29/09/2013 19:59, Tanstaafl wrote: I've been told that this shouldn't be a big deal... while I am a (barely) passable linux sys admin Allow me to forward an opinion. The above is not true, not even close. Don't knock yourself, you don't deserve it :-) In my day job I get to meet many people, and vast fleets of them are paid obscene amounts of money to do sysadmin work. I have an unprintable opinion of most of these folks (I'm tired of cleaning up after them and they mess they leave). You on the other hand would wipe the floor with easily 95% of those clowns. Seriously. And that goes for just about everyone else on this list who has been around a while. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 1:31 AM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: One thing that you seem to be missing here. Before Gentoo, I used Mandrake. It had a init thingy. It caused me much grief and is one reason I left Mandrake. I also didn't like the upgrade process either but one reason I chose Gentoo is no init thingy. I wanted to be rid of that. Now, whether it is udev or not, here comes that stupid init thingy just because someone doesn't want to put files where they should be which is not inside /usr. So, given my history with the init thingy, if I do use a init thingy and it fails for whatever reason, I'll be installing something else. I done went down the road of trying to fix one of those stupid things and I have no plan or desire to do so again. I'm also not going to spend hours reinstalling Gentoo either. If, more than likely when, the init thingy fails, I'll be installing something else and I'll most my last sign off message here. One thing about Linux, there are plenty of distros to pick from . I love Gentoo but I like to be able to boot up without dealing with a init thingy that I have to fix when it goes belly up. Dale I don't know why people keep humoring this kind of explanation for systemd, udev, or /usr FUD, but this is not a rational way to think. It's the same kind of excuse to say I'm never going to use any kind of Linux, even Android, because I tried it 3 or 4 times when it was on floppies, and I couldn't get it to work. I'm really sorry about your terrible experience with init thingies in the past, but you've got to face the facts: 1) most distros today, Kubuntu included, bundle an init thingy and it works flawlessly for them. 2) you really, seriously, have to own up to the fact that your init thingy failing was very likely your fault (because of 1) 3) managing init thingies has gotten ridiculously easy over time as compared to when you manually had to build them Especially that number 2 part. I mean, let's not forget that character of Gentoo as a distribution. Or heck, even *nix distributions in general. *nix distributions give you a lot of tools to arrange your systems the way you want, i.e. choice, but it is always implicitly under the assumption that the choice you're making is an *informed* choice. That's why you're asked to read the manual, or check the readmes, or check the sample configs, and in this day and age, do a basic search for working examples, before asking questions. *nix is not, and has never been about being polite to users who don't know what they are doing, and has always been about being efficient to users who do. I've been recommended to put it over the top bluntly before, so: 1) STOP. FREAKING. BEING. IRRATIONAL. 2) STOP BLAMING INIT THINGIES FOR YOUR MISTAKES. THE DAMNED THINGS WORK. 3) If you're scared of doing an init thingy *manually*, just read and do the howto of the simplest init thingy manager in town (dracut? genkernel?). It surely takes less time and effort than migrating to Kubuntu or whatever. -- This email is:[ ] actionable [x] fyi[x] social Response needed: [ ] yes [x] up to you [ ] no Time-sensitive: [ ] immediate[ ] soon [x] none
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 29/09/2013 17:41, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote: On Sep 29, 2013 3:33 AM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com mailto:alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: [snip] Exherbo might be worth a look too[1]. It's a sort-of Gentoo fork using the portage tree and PMS; plus Ciaran strikes me as the kind of guy who *would* expend massive effort to find a way round current udev and systemd. [1] I didn't look myself. I have no idea what Exherbo's stance is on this matter. Exherbo recommends installing systemd [1]. Sabayon installs systemd by default [2]. Funtoo is considering running GNOME =3.8 in a container so systemd doesn't impact the rest of the system [3] (which by the way looks like an interesting idea). However, in the same link Daniel Robbins says: [...] from my perspective, I think it is simply so people can run GNOME. I do like GNOME 3.6. I like their new UI. It would be nice to run 3.8. I don't care about systemd. It is simply a dep of GNOME. That is all. I see that as being open to the idea of using systemd in the future. It doesn't say that they'll never support systemd, as others would. Well, users; for the people that actually write the code, the majority seems to like systemd, or at least don't have a problem with it. Anyhow, many in this thread forget that it was the OpenRC maintainer the one that proposed the change to stop supporting a separate /usr without an initramfs. If you use OpenRC, and have a separate /usr without an initramfs, and *anything * breaks in your machine, you get to keep the pieces. No (official) support for you. It doesn't matter if you use udev, eudev (which is the same, just emasculated), nor mdev. OpenRC will start assuming an early available /usr; that's why its maintainer championed the change. It needs it to actually compete with systemd. So even Funtoo will need the same requirement, unless they switch to runit. As others have said, this is not really related to systemd/udev. It's OpenRC, the official and (still) recommended init system for Gentoo, the one that is making the change. Thanks for that info. I don't keep current with the Gentoo-derived distros as gentoo itself works great for me. And about time, if you ask me. Agreed. I myself fought this change in my head for ages. And changed my mind for the same reasons so many other people have done so too. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 29/09/2013 19:55, Tanstaafl wrote: [snip] I have *never* merged a critical filesystem on a critical server like this before. Please see the news item for what it actually is, not something else. I see it as an ultimatum that I *must* change a server that has been running flawlessly for years, or face breakage at some point in the NEAR future. I also view this as a potential 'shot across the bow' warning that systemd is coming and will be shoved down our throats, like it or not. Maybe it isn't, but judging solely by recent events, I think that is much more likely than not. William himself clarified in this thread why he pushed for this change to happen, and it has nothing to do with systemd. As for what it takes to get your system in line with what the news item says, it usually is as simple as moving some files around and editing fstab. Of course, you still need to do your planning and research, especially listing out how much space you have where an is it enough. But that is just routine sysadmin investigation stuff as is always done before embarking on any change or update. An analogy might be the manufacturer telling you your car is subject to a recall to replace a brake item under warranty, and your insurance telling you to do it sometime this month or face having your insurance voided. Yeah, it's inconvenient but once done is actually not such a big deal. mechanics work on brakes all the time all over the world and very very few people have accidents as a result. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 2013-09-29 4:09 PM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: On 29/09/2013 19:59, Tanstaafl wrote: I've been told that this shouldn't be a big deal... while I am a (barely) passable linux sys admin Allow me to forward an opinion. The above is not true, not even close. Don't knock yourself, you don't deserve it :-) Lol!!! At first I thought you were saying that it wasn't true that merging /usr into / shouldn't be a big deal - and I was about to start gnashing my teeth (again). Thanks Alan, your words are very kind... and I'll just leave it at that... ;)
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 29/09/2013 20:55, William Hubbs wrote: On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 01:55:49PM -0400, Tanstaafl wrote: On 2013-09-28 6:36 PM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: So this brings us back to the essential technical problem that still needs to be solved on your machines: /usr needs to be available (and not only for BT keyboards) at the earliest possible opportunity - this is a technical constraint. To guarantee that, you need to either merge /usr with /, or use an initramfs to guarantee that /usr is available before anything else happens in userland. It*really* is that simple. If you have a better solution than my last two choices, then I am all ears. Ok, and if this is all true, I can accept it. Alan, this is a very good summary of the issues involved. Everyone on the list should go and read flameeyes' blog post then this summary. Thanks William. It really was an off-the cuff description done to answer a user's question. I'm glad to hear it communicated what I intended. Tanstaaf, I am the OpenRC author/maintainer and a member of base-system. I can tell you that we are not discussing forcing systemd on everyone in Gentoo Linux as a default init system. I can also tell you that I am not aware of the Gentoo systemd team discussing this. Even if they were, a distro-wide change like this would have to be brought before the Council. William -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Managing multiple systems with identical hardware
On 29/09/2013 20:36, Grant wrote: I'm slowly coming to conclsuion that you are trying to solve a problem with Gentoo that binary distros already solved a very long time ago. You are forcing yourself to become the sole maintainer of GrantOS and do all the heavy lifting of packaging. But, Mint and friends already did all that work already and frankly, they are much better at it than you or I. I think it will work if I can find a way to manage the few differences above. Am I overlooking any potential issues? I think Grant Should look at CFengine, if he is not familar with it. It is the traditional 800 pound Gorrilla when it comes to managing many systems. Surely there are folks there in those forums that can help Grant filter his ideas until they are ready for action. CFengine is in portage. Alan may be right, as CFengine (or whatever) may work better with a binary distribution and is probable more tightly integrated with something like debian or such OSes. Can you give me a general idea of how my workflow might be with a solution like that? It's not really possible to give a cut and dried answer to that, as all three solutions (CFEngine, Puppet, Chef) try hard to integrate themselves into your needs rather than get you to integrate into a rigid code-imposed system. I could say that you load a config into Puppet, define how it works and where it must go, then tell puppet to do it and let you know the results, but that doesn't tell you much. I reckon you should pop over to puppet's website and start reading. As you grasp the general ideas you'll find ways to make it work for you. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
Weird - I thought I replied to this a while ago (I know I started one), but it disappeared, and is not in my Sent folder and it never made it to the list... On 2013-09-29 2:55 PM, William Hubbs willi...@gentoo.org wrote: I am the OpenRC author/maintainer and a member of base-system. I can tell you that we are not discussing forcing systemd on everyone in Gentoo Linux as a default init system. I can also tell you that I am not aware of the Gentoo systemd team discussing this. Even if they were, a distro-wide change like this would have to be brought before the Council. Thanks very much for this William. I will take you at your word and will stop worrying about the whole systemd thing (unless/until evidence warrants revisiting it)... So, now I just have to get up the nerve to attempt the merging of my LVM based /usr into my / so I don't have to worry about an initramfs. There are no technical reasons it shouldn't work - my / is 19G, with 18GB free right now. My /usr currently takes up 13GB, so merging should leave mw with 5GB free... Does anyone see an issue with a 19GB / with merged /usr and only 5GB free? Was I correct in my statement to Dale that there is nothing used by or stored in /usr that could consume that last 5GB and crash my server (ie, like a runaway log can fill up /var)? Thanks again...
Re: [gentoo-user] Managing multiple systems with identical hardware
On 29/09/2013 20:31, Grant wrote: [snip] There's one thing that we haven't touched on, and that's the hardware. Are they all identical hardware items, or at least compatible? Kernel builds and hardware-sensitive apps like mplayer are the top reasons you'd want to centralize things, but those are the very apps that will make sure life miserable trying to fins commonality that works in all cases. So do keep hardware needs in mind when making purchases. Keeping all of the laptops 100% identical as far as hardware is central to this plan. I know I'm setting myself up for big problems otherwise. OK Personally, I wouldn't do the building and pushing on my own laptop, that turns me inot the central server and updates only happen when I'm in the office. I'd use a central build host and my laptop is just another client. Not all that important really, the build host is just an address from the client's point of view I don't think I'm making the connection here. The central server can't do any unattended building and pushing, correct? So I would need to be around either way I think. I'm hoping I can emerge every package on my laptop that every other laptop needs. That way I can fix any build problems and update any config files right on my own system. Then I would push config file differences to all of the other laptops. Then each laptop could emerge its own stuff unattended. I see what you desire now - essentially you want to clone your laptop (or big chunks of it) over to your other workstations. No problem, just share your laptop's stuff with the workstations. Either share it directly, or upload your laptops configs and buildpks to a central fileserver where the workstations can access them (it comes down to the same thing really) OK, I'm thinking over how much variation there would be from laptop to laptop: 1. /etc/runlevels/default/* would vary of course. 2. /etc/conf.d/net would vary for the routers and my laptop which I sometimes use as a router. 3. /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf under the same conditions as #2. 4. Users and /home would vary but the office workstations could all be identical in this regard. Am I missing anything? I can imagine everything else being totally identical. What could I use to manage these differences? I'm sure there are numerous files in /etc/ with small niggling differences, you will find these as you go along. In a Linux world, these files actually do not subject themselves to centralization very well, they really do need a human with clue to make a decision whilst having access to the laptop in question. Every time we've brain-stormed this at work, we end up with only two realistic options: go to every machine and configure it there directly, or put individual per-host configs into puppet and push. It comes down to the same thing, the only difference is the location where stuff is stored. I'm sure I will need to carefully define those config differences. Can I set up puppet (or similar) on my laptop and use it to push config updates to all of the other laptops? That way the package I'm using to push will be aware of config differences per system and push everything correctly. You said not to use puppet, but does that apply in this scenario? My warning about using Puppet on Gentoo should have come with a disclaimer: don't use puppet to make a Gentoo machine to emerge packages from source. You intend to push binary packages always, where the workstation doesn't have a choice in what it gets (you already decided that earlier). That will work well and from your workstation's POV is almost identical to how binary distros work. I'm slowly coming to conclsuion that you are trying to solve a problem with Gentoo that binary distros already solved a very long time ago. You are forcing yourself to become the sole maintainer of GrantOS and do all the heavy lifting of packaging. But, Mint and friends already did all that work already and frankly, they are much better at it than you or I. Interesting. When I switched from Windows about 10 years ago I had only a very brief run with Mandrake before I settled on Gentoo so I don't *really* know what a binary distro is about. How would this workflow be different on a binary distro? A binary distro would be the same as I described above. How those distros work is quite simple - their packages are archives like quickpkgs with pre- and post- install/uninstall scripts. These script do exactly the same thing as the various phase functions in portage - they define where to move files to, ownerships and permissions of them, and maybe a migration script if needed. The distro's package manager deals with all the details - you just tell it what you want installed and it goes ahead and does it. What the Puppet server does is tell the workstation it needs to install package XYZ. Code on the workstation then runs the package manager to do just that. For config
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 29/09/2013 22:51, Tanstaafl wrote: Weird - I thought I replied to this a while ago (I know I started one), but it disappeared, and is not in my Sent folder and it never made it to the list... On 2013-09-29 2:55 PM, William Hubbs willi...@gentoo.org wrote: I am the OpenRC author/maintainer and a member of base-system. I can tell you that we are not discussing forcing systemd on everyone in Gentoo Linux as a default init system. I can also tell you that I am not aware of the Gentoo systemd team discussing this. Even if they were, a distro-wide change like this would have to be brought before the Council. Thanks very much for this William. I will take you at your word and will stop worrying about the whole systemd thing (unless/until evidence warrants revisiting it)... So, now I just have to get up the nerve to attempt the merging of my LVM based /usr into my / so I don't have to worry about an initramfs. There are no technical reasons it shouldn't work - my / is 19G, with 18GB free right now. My /usr currently takes up 13GB, so merging should leave mw with 5GB free... Does anyone see an issue with a 19GB / with merged /usr and only 5GB free? Was I correct in my statement to Dale that there is nothing used by or stored in /usr that could consume that last 5GB and crash my server (ie, like a runaway log can fill up /var)? Thanks again... Correct on all counts. This laptop runs KDE, here's my breakdown: # du -sh /usr 13G /usr # du -sh /usr/* 12K /usr/INSTALL 104K/usr/Licenses_for_Third-Party_Components.txt 426M/usr/bin 12M /usr/gnu-classpath-0.98 460M/usr/include 0 /usr/lib 525M/usr/lib32 2.8G/usr/lib64 134M/usr/libexec 512K/usr/local 38M /usr/sbin 3.6G/usr/share 4.9G/usr/src 0 /usr/tmp 11M /usr/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu Those numbers are not likely to change much with time, with one exception: /usr/src That can get real big real quick if you don't clean up kernel sources often. Ideally, you'd make that a suitably sized LV and mount it seperately. The other space consumer is /usr/share with it's many documentation files. But those too tend to be stable once you have everything installed. 5G free out of 19G is ~75% space in use which is perfectly acceptable for this case. Regular monitoring of the state of your machines will tell you if space usage increases so you can investigate and deal with it timeously. I assume you long since moved portage and it's storage directories out of /usr into /var? -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 02:45:05PM -0400, Tanstaafl wrote On 2013-09-29 2:25 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Tanstaafl wrote: The way I see it, if you cannot provide a rational answer to that question, then there is no reason for you to use this as a reason to abandon gentoo, only a reason to merge /usr into /... Simple, I have never had to resize / or /boot before. I have had to resize /usr, /var and /home several times tho. THAT is the reason. Ok, but... everything I've read and personal experience over the years shows that space required for /usr should not change much, especially constantly grow over time (like requirements for /home can and will)- it may fluctuate (increase, decrease) *a little* over time, but it definitely should not grow substantially, so, if you had to resize it, most likely it is because you simply didn't allocate enough room to start with. For me, it doesn't matter if it is rational to YOU or not. Sorry, but rationality is not subjective. Just because something seems to be rational to you doesn't mean that it is. You have still not stated a logical, rational reason for wanting a separate /usr. Here's my version of LVM without the overhead of LVM to allow maximum flexibity, without the overhead of LVM. * /dev/sda is the entire 1 terabyte drive (extended partition) * /dev/sda5 is 200 *MEGA*bytes (YES! 200 * 10^6). It's the rootfs and physically contains / and /boot, etc, etc. It also has empty directories /home, /opt, /var, /usr, and /tmp * /dev/sda6 is swap, a few gigabytes * /dev/sda7 is the rest of the hard drive. It is mounted as /home. It contains directories bindmounts/opt bindmounts/var bindmounts/usr and bindmounts/tmp * Note the following excerpt from /etc/fstab /dev/sda5 / ext2 noatime,nodiratime,async 0 1 /dev/sda7 /home ext4 noatime,nodiratime,async 0 1 /home/bindmounts/opt/opt auto bind 0 0 /home/bindmounts/var/var auto bind 0 0 /home/bindmounts/usr/usr auto bind 0 0 /home/bindmounts/tmp/tmp auto bind 0 0 /dev/sda6 none swap sw The rootfs is currently 22% used, so no worries there. I originally adopted this setup years ago when I was bouncing around between distros. It allowed me to change to an entirely different distro without blowing away my user directory. Even today, it gives me maximum flexibility without the overhead of LVM. -- Walter Dnes waltd...@waltdnes.org I don't run desktop environments; I run useful applications
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Sun, 29 Sep 2013 17:23:20 -0400, Walter Dnes wrote: Here's my version of LVM without the overhead of LVM to allow maximum flexibity, without the overhead of LVM. This gives you one of the advantages of LVM, the ability to use space on a single drive as your needs change. It doesn't allow you t use multiple drives, use different filesystems or filesystem options for different mount points, prevent one filesystem from stealing space from another (although you can do this with quotas) or use snapshots. -- Neil Bothwick The three Rs of Microsoft support: Retry, Reboot, Reinstall. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
Tanstaafl wrote: On 2013-09-29 2:25 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Tanstaafl wrote: The way I see it, if you cannot provide a rational answer to that question, then there is no reason for you to use this as a reason to abandon gentoo, only a reason to merge /usr into /... Simple, I have never had to resize / or /boot before. I have had to resize /usr, /var and /home several times tho. THAT is the reason. Ok, but... everything I've read and personal experience over the years shows that space required for /usr should not change much, especially constantly grow over time (like requirements for /home can and will)- it may fluctuate (increase, decrease) *a little* over time, but it definitely should not grow substantially, so, if you had to resize it, most likely it is because you simply didn't allocate enough room to start with. So my experience doesn't matter any then? My /usr does vary and sometimes varies quite a bit. That is why I had to resize the thing. Saying that I didn't make it large enough to begin with isn't the point. When people use LVM, the reason they use it is so that we can resize things when needed. For me, it doesn't matter if it is rational to YOU or not. Sorry, but rationality is not subjective. Just because something seems to be rational to you doesn't mean that it is. You have still not stated a logical, rational reason for wanting a separate /usr. And what is ratinal for you, is not rational to me. Since you can dismiss mine, I can dismiss yours too. Funny how that works huh? For ME, it is logical/rational for me to have the setup like I have it. I did it this way to speciffically avoid the init thingy and be flexible when needed. If I wanted one, I would have used one when I first installed Gentoo and not only that, put everything but /boot on LVM. I am the one doing things on my puter not you or anyone else. If the init thingy fails, that will be me staring at a error message, not you. I don't want one of those things either, but that isn't what I was questioning you about. Of course you can do whatever you want *and* are technically capable of on your own computer, but that doesn't automatically make those things logical or rational. I did see one good case for a separate /usr (someone who was using ancient PATA drives, and something about striping for performance), but that was obviously a corner case... You may not since you are not sitting in MY chair. My statements are not trying to change the way you run your puter, but yours seem to be trying to get me to change mine. I don't want to change mine when it comes to adding a init thingy to the boot process. Simple as that. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 29/09/2013 23:32, Neil Bothwick wrote: On Sun, 29 Sep 2013 17:23:20 -0400, Walter Dnes wrote: Here's my version of LVM without the overhead of LVM to allow maximum flexibity, without the overhead of LVM. This gives you one of the advantages of LVM, the ability to use space on a single drive as your needs change. It doesn't allow you t use multiple drives, use different filesystems or filesystem options for different mount points, prevent one filesystem from stealing space from another (although you can do this with quotas) or use snapshots. thread_derail And it also prevents him from using The One True Filesystem That Will Rule Them All and In the Darkness Bind Them: ZFS /thread_derail -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Flexibility and robustness in the Linux organisim
Alan McKinnon wrote: On 29/09/2013 18:33, Dale wrote: that gnome is very hostile when it comes to KDE or choice is not news. And their dependency on systemd is just the usual madness. But they are not to blame for seperate /usr and the breakage it causes. If not, then what was it? You seem to know what it was that started it so why not share? He already said it. Someone added a hard disk to a PDP-9 (or was it an 11?) Literally. It all traces back to that. In those days there was no such thing as volume management or raid. If you added a (seriously expensive) disk the only feasible way to get it's storage in the system was to mount it as a separate volume. From that one single action this entire mess of separate /usr arose as folks discovered more and more reasons to consider it good and keep it around That wasn't the question tho. My question wasn't about many years ago but who made the change that broke support for a seperate /usr with no init thingy. The change that happened in the past few years. I think I got my answer already tho. Seems William Hubbs answered it but I plan to read his message again. Different thread tho. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
Neil Bothwick wrote: On Sat, 28 Sep 2013 18:09:40 -0500, Dale wrote: Read the kernel docs on initramfs, you'll then understand that this is not true. Point is, they are the same to me. Both stand between grub and the kernel and add yet one more point of failure. I'm not going to nitpck on the difference between them since I view both in the same way. They are not the same. Your stating that they are the same to you is effectively saying I know what I believe, don't bother me with the real facts. They are the same to me as yet one more point of failure that I DO NOT want. I have dealt with those in the past and I don't want either of them and I don't care of it is called cute teddy bears or whatever. My point still stands, it is one more thing between grub and the kernel and I don't want it. Except you can never break Gentoo with a kernel update because, unlike some other distros, installing a new kernel does not uninstall the previous one. No matter how badly wrng a kernel update goes, you can always hit reset then select the old one from the GRUB menu - reinstallation doesn't come into it. Provided that the old one works tho right? What if I update and it breaks more than one thing? Then what? That's got nothing to do with the kernel, initramfs or separate /usr. Once init is running, all that is history, it's done its job. If something subsequently fails, it has nothing to do with mounting / and /usr (which is all the initramfs does). If I select what to boot in grub and it fails, there I sit. If I try another and it fails, there I sit. I have enough issues at times already. I don't want one more that already has a bad, VERY bad, history with me. I have enough fun with the kernel at times. This isn't even as close as comparing apples and oranges. To ME, a init thingy is a init thingy. That's why I call them all init thingys. To ME, both are apples. One may be green and another red but both are still apples. Please, don't ever offer to feed me :-) You would be surprised, I am one heck of a cook. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
Mark David Dumlao wrote: On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 1:31 AM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: One thing that you seem to be missing here. Before Gentoo, I used Mandrake. It had a init thingy. It caused me much grief and is one reason I left Mandrake. I also didn't like the upgrade process either but one reason I chose Gentoo is no init thingy. I wanted to be rid of that. Now, whether it is udev or not, here comes that stupid init thingy just because someone doesn't want to put files where they should be which is not inside /usr. So, given my history with the init thingy, if I do use a init thingy and it fails for whatever reason, I'll be installing something else. I done went down the road of trying to fix one of those stupid things and I have no plan or desire to do so again. I'm also not going to spend hours reinstalling Gentoo either. If, more than likely when, the init thingy fails, I'll be installing something else and I'll most my last sign off message here. One thing about Linux, there are plenty of distros to pick from . I love Gentoo but I like to be able to boot up without dealing with a init thingy that I have to fix when it goes belly up. Dale I don't know why people keep humoring this kind of explanation for systemd, udev, or /usr FUD, but this is not a rational way to think. It's the same kind of excuse to say I'm never going to use any kind of Linux, even Android, because I tried it 3 or 4 times when it was on floppies, and I couldn't get it to work. I'm really sorry about your terrible experience with init thingies in the past, but you've got to face the facts: 1) most distros today, Kubuntu included, bundle an init thingy and it works flawlessly for them. 2) you really, seriously, have to own up to the fact that your init thingy failing was very likely your fault (because of 1) 3) managing init thingies has gotten ridiculously easy over time as compared to when you manually had to build them Especially that number 2 part. I mean, let's not forget that character of Gentoo as a distribution. Or heck, even *nix distributions in general. *nix distributions give you a lot of tools to arrange your systems the way you want, i.e. choice, but it is always implicitly under the assumption that the choice you're making is an *informed* choice. That's why you're asked to read the manual, or check the readmes, or check the sample configs, and in this day and age, do a basic search for working examples, before asking questions. *nix is not, and has never been about being polite to users who don't know what they are doing, and has always been about being efficient to users who do. I've been recommended to put it over the top bluntly before, so: 1) STOP. FREAKING. BEING. IRRATIONAL. 2) STOP BLAMING INIT THINGIES FOR YOUR MISTAKES. THE DAMNED THINGS WORK. 3) If you're scared of doing an init thingy *manually*, just read and do the howto of the simplest init thingy manager in town (dracut? genkernel?). It surely takes less time and effort than migrating to Kubuntu or whatever. Already tried making a init thingy from a really nice howto, Gentoo one I think. Failed big time. Heck, the init thingy barely even loaded before it failed. I seem to recall posting on here. As far as I know, no one knew how to fix it or what was wrong. The dracut one worked but if it ever failed, I'm in the same boat, no freaking clue how to fix it or where to start and if I can't boot, no help either. So just to update, my most recent experience wasn't to good either. It isn't all about YEARS ago. It is also about more recent attempts. One thing about Kubuntu and other distros, it installs in a fraction of time that Gentoo does. Also, I don't have to fiddle with the init thingy, it does it and hopefully correctly. If not, reinstall. If that happens to often, try something else. May be FUD to you but it is real to me. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 06:10:46PM +0200, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote From REDHATs or SuSEs perspective seperate /usr is not a problem. Putting lvm/bluetooth/mdraid/whateverthefuckyoumightneed there was and is not a problem too. Thanks to initrdsco. And if I wanted to run bleeping Redhat Fedora, I'd run bleeping Redhat Fedora. I want GNU/Linu-x, not GNOME/Lenna-x. They are using them for AGES and it works fine. * Loading firmware into the kernel worked fine for AGES, until Kay Seivers broke udev... https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/10/2/303 * Everybody's single-NIC machine came up with eth0 for AGES, until Kay Seivers broke udev. And calling the new setup predictable is George Orwell 1984 doublespeak. Let's see you walk up to an unknown machine and predict what the NIC is going to come up as. * Separate /usr worked fine for AGES, until... Do you see a pattern developing here? -- Walter Dnes waltd...@waltdnes.org I don't run desktop environments; I run useful applications
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Flexibility and robustness in the Linux organisim
On 29/09/2013 23:41, Dale wrote: Alan McKinnon wrote: On 29/09/2013 18:33, Dale wrote: that gnome is very hostile when it comes to KDE or choice is not news. And their dependency on systemd is just the usual madness. But they are not to blame for seperate /usr and the breakage it causes. If not, then what was it? You seem to know what it was that started it so why not share? He already said it. Someone added a hard disk to a PDP-9 (or was it an 11?) Literally. It all traces back to that. In those days there was no such thing as volume management or raid. If you added a (seriously expensive) disk the only feasible way to get it's storage in the system was to mount it as a separate volume. From that one single action this entire mess of separate /usr arose as folks discovered more and more reasons to consider it good and keep it around That wasn't the question tho. My question wasn't about many years ago but who made the change that broke support for a seperate /usr with no init thingy. The change that happened in the past few years. I think I got my answer already tho. Seems William Hubbs answered it but I plan to read his message again. Different thread tho. Nobody broke it. It's the general idea that you can leave /usr unmounted until some random arb time later in the startup sequence and just expect things to work out fine that is broken. It just happened to work OK for years because nothing happened to use the code in /usr at that point in the sequence. More and more we are seeing that this is no longer the case. So no-one broke it with a specific commit. It has always been broken by design becuase it's a damn stupid idea that just happened to work by fluke. IT and computing is rife with this kind of error. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 6:00 AM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Mark David Dumlao wrote: On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 1:31 AM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: One thing that you seem to be missing here. Before Gentoo, I used Mandrake. It had a init thingy. It caused me much grief and is one reason I left Mandrake. I also didn't like the upgrade process either but one reason I chose Gentoo is no init thingy. I wanted to be rid of that. Now, whether it is udev or not, here comes that stupid init thingy just because someone doesn't want to put files where they should be which is not inside /usr. So, given my history with the init thingy, if I do use a init thingy and it fails for whatever reason, I'll be installing something else. I done went down the road of trying to fix one of those stupid things and I have no plan or desire to do so again. I'm also not going to spend hours reinstalling Gentoo either. If, more than likely when, the init thingy fails, I'll be installing something else and I'll most my last sign off message here. One thing about Linux, there are plenty of distros to pick from . I love Gentoo but I like to be able to boot up without dealing with a init thingy that I have to fix when it goes belly up. Dale I don't know why people keep humoring this kind of explanation for systemd, udev, or /usr FUD, but this is not a rational way to think. It's the same kind of excuse to say I'm never going to use any kind of Linux, even Android, because I tried it 3 or 4 times when it was on floppies, and I couldn't get it to work. I'm really sorry about your terrible experience with init thingies in the past, but you've got to face the facts: 1) most distros today, Kubuntu included, bundle an init thingy and it works flawlessly for them. 2) you really, seriously, have to own up to the fact that your init thingy failing was very likely your fault (because of 1) 3) managing init thingies has gotten ridiculously easy over time as compared to when you manually had to build them Especially that number 2 part. I mean, let's not forget that character of Gentoo as a distribution. Or heck, even *nix distributions in general. *nix distributions give you a lot of tools to arrange your systems the way you want, i.e. choice, but it is always implicitly under the assumption that the choice you're making is an *informed* choice. That's why you're asked to read the manual, or check the readmes, or check the sample configs, and in this day and age, do a basic search for working examples, before asking questions. *nix is not, and has never been about being polite to users who don't know what they are doing, and has always been about being efficient to users who do. I've been recommended to put it over the top bluntly before, so: 1) STOP. FREAKING. BEING. IRRATIONAL. 2) STOP BLAMING INIT THINGIES FOR YOUR MISTAKES. THE DAMNED THINGS WORK. 3) If you're scared of doing an init thingy *manually*, just read and do the howto of the simplest init thingy manager in town (dracut? genkernel?). It surely takes less time and effort than migrating to Kubuntu or whatever. Already tried making a init thingy from a really nice howto, Gentoo one I think. Failed big time. Heck, the init thingy barely even loaded before it failed. I seem to recall posting on here. As far as I know, no one knew how to fix it or what was wrong. The dracut one worked but if it ever failed, I'm in the same boat, no freaking clue how to fix it or where to start and if I can't boot, no help either. So just to update, my most recent experience wasn't to good either. It isn't all about YEARS ago. It is also about more recent attempts. Meanwhile, for more stupidly over the top blunt trauma: Please grow up and read your excuses for what they are. You (1) failed to make an init thingy manually (2) refuse to use a known working system that thousands use on account of GREMLINS and (3) threaten to replace it with another working system that thousands use. but no gremlins here! At the end of they day, you don't want to learn how to do it the hard way. So do it the easy way and be done with your troubles. If you don't want to do it EITHER way fine, but stop pretending that it's anything else but a problem with your attitude. You're being exactly the kind of user that unpaid volunteer devs don't want to waste time having to support. -- This email is:[ ] actionable [ ] fyi[x] social Response needed: [ ] yes [x] up to you [ ] no Time-sensitive: [ ] immediate[ ] soon [x] none
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Flexibility and robustness in the Linux organisim
Am 29.09.2013 18:41, schrieb Francisco Blas Izquierdo Riera (klondike): El 29/09/13 18:03, Volker Armin Hemmann escribió: Am 29.09.2013 17:12, schrieb Greg Woodbury: On 09/29/2013 07:58 AM, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: things were broken way before that. As much as I hate systemd, it is not the root cause of the problem. The problems were caused by people saying that seperate /usr was a good idea, so / would not fill up and similar idiocies. The problems were caused by people saying that lvm is a good idea - for desktops. Those people who are fighting against the kernel auto assembling raids are to blame too. Systemd is just another point in a very long list. The usr filesystem was separate from root from the very early days of UNIX. Disks were *tiny* (compared to today) and spreading certain things across separate spindles provided major benefits. Certainly, the original need to require a separate usr went away fairly quickly, but other benefits continued to encourage a seperation between root and usr. in the very early days /usr did not exist in the first space and was only created because someone added a harddisk. Not really a good reason to keep it around. I'm going to show the lack of sense of this argument: in the very early days linux did not exist in the first space and was only created because someone got a 386. Not really a good reason to keep it around. wrong analogy and it goes down from here. Really. in the very early days GNU did not exist in the first space and was only created because someone jammed a printer. Not really a good reason to keep it around. in the very early days Gentoo did not exist in the first space and was only created because someone added a processor. Not really a good reason to keep it around. in the very early days hardening did not exist in the first space and was only created because someone added security. Not really a good reason to keep it around. in the very early days Gnome did not exist in the first space and was only created because someone got a graphics card. Not really a good reason to keep it around. I'm sure you'll be able to figure out the pattern there. Ohh and BTW, /usr was not just added because someone added a harddrive, in most cases it was used to allow machines contain a very small system on / which was enough to just boot and mount a networked system (/usr) containing most of the software. This allowed for cheaper deployment of machines since the hard drive could be smaller as it wouldn't need to have all the data locally. Yeah, if this sounds familiar is because this was later moved to initramfs. no, network'ed file systems came a lot later. Initially /usr was added because one harddisk was full. Really, that is the whole reason for its (broken) existance. The var filesystem was for variable system data, and was never terribly big and its inclusion on the root volume happened. The home filesystem became traditionally separate because data expands to fill all availab;e space, and users collect *things* and a seperate /home does not create any problems. /var is much more prone to accidentally fill up then /usr ever was. You are jst getting it wrong, /var was kept locally as the data there was supposed to change from machine to machine. no, you just don't understand what I wrote. People told other people to keep /usr seperate so / may not fill up by accident. That advise always was murky at best. Outright stupid is a good description too. /usr is not prone to much changes. So if your / fits the contents of /usr just fine, there is pretty much no risk. /var on the other hand tends to explode - but a lot of people never got told to put /var on a seperate disk. If you ever realized that a tens of gigabyte logfile just made your box unbootable, you learnt a lot that day. Networking made it possible to have home entirely off system, and diskless worstations ruled for a while as well. By the time Linux came along, it had become common for boot volumes to not be mounted during normal system operation, but the three filesystem layout was common and workable. As Linux continued to be like Topsy (she jest growed!) fragmentation started to occur as distributions arose. The balkanization of Linux distributions became a real concern to some and standardization offorts were encouraged. The File System Standard (FSS) was renamed to the Filesystem Hierarch Standard (FHS) and it was strongly based on the UNIX System V definitions (which called for seperation of usr and root.) POSIX added more layers and attempted to bring in the various BSD flavors. THe LSB (Linux Standards Base) effort was conceived as supersceeding all the other efforts, and FHS was folded into the LSB definition. Yet even then a separate root and usr distinction survived. Then things started falling apart again - POSIX rose like a phoenix and even the Windows/wintel environment could claim
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 2013-09-29 5:15 PM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: Those numbers are not likely to change much with time, with one exception: /usr/src That can get real big real quick if you don't clean up kernel sources often. Ideally, you'd make that a suitably sized LV and mount it seperately. Yeah, I always keep 2 or 3 known good kernels, and clean out the old stuff, so no worries there. The other space consumer is /usr/share with it's many documentation files. But those too tend to be stable once you have everything installed. 5G free out of 19G is ~75% space in use which is perfectly acceptable for this case. Regular monitoring of the state of your machines will tell you if space usage increases so you can investigate and deal with it timeously. I assume you long since moved portage and it's storage directories out of /usr into /var? Hmmm... No, I never did that myself... Wow... moria : Sun Sep 29, 18:19:01 : ~ # du -sh /usr/* 85M /usr/bin 131M/usr/include 0 /usr/lib 11M /usr/lib32 530M/usr/lib64 51M /usr/libexec 15M /usr/local 7.8G/usr/portage 21M /usr/sbin 509M/usr/share 3.9G/usr/src 0 /usr/tmp 7.0M/usr/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu moria : Sun Sep 29, 18:26:30 : ~ # Is this the official gentoo way now? Will a new/fresh virgin install have /var/portage instead of /usr/portage? I can eliminate almost 8GB by moving portage and its storage directories... I don't recall seeing a news item about that... But... is /usr/portage the default/recommended location? If so, then I don't think I want to move it - I generally never change defaults unless there is a very good reason to do so. But, is there some official gentoo docs online explaining how to do this? Something more to think about... Also - is there any kind of maintenance I shoudl be doing on /usr/portage to clean old cruft out? Or does portage maintain it already. :)
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 2013-09-29 5:35 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Tanstaafl wrote: Ok, but... everything I've read and personal experience over the years shows that space required for /usr should not change much, especially constantly grow over time (like requirements for /home can and will)- it may fluctuate (increase, decrease) *a little* over time, but it definitely should not grow substantially, so, if you had to resize it, most likely it is because you simply didn't allocate enough room to start with. So my experience doesn't matter any then? Dale, that is NOT what I said, and nothing I am saying is intended to be offensive. My /usr does vary and sometimes varies quite a bit. The question you should be asking yourself then, is WHY? That is why I had to resize the thing. Saying that I didn't make it large enough to begin with isn't the point. It is precisely the point... The fact is, there is nothing in there that *should* vary much (once your system is fully installed) - unless you are using it in some non-standard way, and/or not occasionally cleaning out /usr/src (as Alan pointed out)... and if either of those is the case, then as I said, it is your own fault that you needed to resize it. Don't you see how contradictory it is to say that you will change from gentoo to distro-x because gentoo has made a change that requires you to either merge /usr into / or use an 'init thingy', when distro-x, that you say you will change to, USES AN INIT THINGY? Doesn't that sound irrational to you? What would be logical and rational would be to either: a) learn how to use an init thingy (which from some more reading I've been doing, doesn't look quite as bad as it seemed initially), or b) determine what is a sane size for /usr, make / an appropriate size to subsume it, and merge it into /. Now, if you don't have enough room in / to merge it, then obviously it will be more painful, but once it is done, you never have to worry about it again - and no init thingy. When people use LVM, the reason they use it is so that we can resize things when needed. Yes, and I use LVM - but again, this is only important for dirs/mnt points that have the potential to consume more and more disk space... that potential is simply not there for (a properly configured and maintained) /usr... And what is rational for you, is not rational to me. Since you can dismiss mine, I can dismiss yours too. Funny how that works huh? Yep... and you can also dismiss my claim that jumping off that 1,000' cliff won't result in you going splat, but it doesn't change the fact that if you jump off of it, you WILL go splat. I just wouldn't get the chance to say I told you so.
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
Am 30.09.2013 00:06, schrieb Walter Dnes: On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 06:10:46PM +0200, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote From REDHATs or SuSEs perspective seperate /usr is not a problem. Putting lvm/bluetooth/mdraid/whateverthefuckyoumightneed there was and is not a problem too. Thanks to initrdsco. And if I wanted to run bleeping Redhat Fedora, I'd run bleeping Redhat Fedora. I want GNU/Linu-x, not GNOME/Lenna-x. luckily nobody forces you to install gnome, systemd or pulseaudio. You don't have to do anything unless you: have /usr on a seperate partition no initrd. If you have no initrd: genkernel it will create one for you. Very easy to use. They are using them for AGES and it works fine. * Loading firmware into the kernel worked fine for AGES, until Kay Seivers broke udev... https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/10/2/303 different story. * Everybody's single-NIC machine came up with eth0 for AGES, until Kay Seivers broke udev. And calling the new setup predictable is George Orwell 1984 doublespeak. Let's see you walk up to an unknown machine and predict what the NIC is going to come up as. and you could predict with the old setup? If think these new names are as stupid as it gets, but I had enough pain in the past with multi-nic boxes shuffling eth0, eth1, ethn+1... randomly on reboots. That was fun. * Separate /usr worked fine for AGES, until... Do you see a pattern developing here? seperate /usr has stopped working fine AGES AGO. Just some setups were lucky enough not to stumble over the wreckage and fall into the shards. Only worse than breakage is silent breakage that seems to be ok. Until the day where some minor and arcane change fucks you up. I have to admit: I don't use init'thingies' - because I don't have to. But back when I played around with different RAID setups I was prepared to use one - because I am not stupid. If I want something to work that needs an 'initthingie', I don't complain and bitch, I read up on 'initthingies'. Besides, AFAIR Dale is the only one who had ever problems with 'initthingies' on this list. And Dale has a lot of problems with stuff that works for everybody else.
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
Am 29.09.2013 19:58, schrieb Tanstaafl: On 2013-09-28 4:17 PM, Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk wrote: On Sat, 28 Sep 2013 19:04:41 +, Alan Mackenzie wrote: I suppose that what I am about to say isn't really relevant, but it is unfortunate over the past year that people blamed udev specifically for this. It is true that it does things that don't work if /usr isn't mounted, but eudev does as well, since it is basically the same code. Who else is there to blame? We are continually being told that a separate /usr is broken, as though this were some unfortunate act of insert your deity here, much like an earthquake. This gets patronising really quickly. (Please note, I'm NOT blaming you here. I appreciate that you're as much victim as Dale or me or anyone else round here.) It's evolution. Linux has for years been moving in this direction, now it has reached the point where the Gentoo devs can no longer devote the increasing time needed to support what has now become an dge case. So the solution is to give users one MONTH to prepare? Why not 6 months, or better, a year? What for gods sake is the rush??? one month to run genkernel is more than enough. And that this point was approaching was clear - what, 2 years ago? At least? Where are the links/pointers to the INTERNAL discussions of this decision? I seriously want to know. If gentoo devs are not willing to provide a 'paper trail' for how this decision was arrived at, and let others judge their decisions based on the merits of their arguments, then what does that say about their true motivations/intentions? marc.info -- gentoo-dev Again, I don't have a problem necessarily with what is being decided (no separate /usr without an initramfs), my problem is with the implementation - giving us one MONTH before we can expect possible breakage with each and every update. No, you already can expect possible breakage with each and every update. In 4 weeks they will stop listening to your complains. The other HUGE thing that worries me, and has me seriously considering switching to FreeBSD NOW, is, maybe there really is a secret, underlying ulterior motive to force both systemd AND an initramfs for everyone in ALL use cases. If that is the case, then say so now, and give those of us who do not want this advanced notice, and I'll just plan on setting my gentoo box to never update on Nov 1, and start working on learning FreeBSD and if necessary, pay someone to help me migrate services to it. so do it. You will be a lot happier there. I am sure. With forcing llvm etc
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Sun, 29 Sep 2013 23:33:55 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: And it also prevents him from using The One True Filesystem That Will Rule Them All and In the Darkness Bind Them: ZFS Now if that was included in the kernel, none of this thread would matter :) -- Neil Bothwick Life's a cache, and then you flush... signature.asc Description: PGP signature
