Re: [gentoo-user] systemd installation location
On 2013-09-30 04:05, Mark David Dumlao wrote: It's true that it's nice to have a semblance of order where different parts go. But all libraries and binaries in /usr is also a semblance of order. You don't separate stuff for the sake of separating stuff. You separate them because you have a good reason to separate them. It turns out that there isn't a good reason to separate them, and that there's no way to predictably separate them. Mushing them together isn't just a stop-gap or good-enough solution. The idea of keeping system-critical separate from non-critical was not maintainable in the long run to begin with. So what you're saying is that everything in /usr is system-critical? I have gimp installed in /usr... I don't see a need to start gimp at boot time. Maybe we should classify frozen-bubble as system-critical as well (it's also in /usr)? Seriously, boot-critical would be something that the system cannot *boot without*, which belongs in /. Everything else should be in /usr, i.e. non-boot-critical. How hard is it to start *non-boot* (system) critical *after* boot (things like sshd)? I do that today... are the same. Distro packagers, however, have to decide for 100% of the cases. So they're going to end up making weird decisions that are easy for you to second-guess but are actually tough. That's only true for binary distros. If you want to solve the hard problem, you want to create a tool that will automate / and /usr migrations. Portage has to be aware of the tool What's wrong with using autotools? I really don't see why you need it to be dynamic. In Gentoo you install stuff once for every version (or if you change use flag). Why invent stuff/complicate matters when you don't need to? Best regards Peter K
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Flexibility and robustness in the Linux organisim
On 2013-09-30 00:04, Alan McKinnon wrote: 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 basically it wasn't broke before stuff started to use the code in /usr. How isn't that breaking? 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. If what you are saying is true then *everything* is broken by design if something isn't available at boot time (may be /usr, may be /var or whatever). Best regards Peter K
Re: [gentoo-user] systemd installation location
On 30/09/2013 08:24, pk wrote: So what you're saying is that everything in /usr is system-critical? I have gimp installed in /usr... I don't see a need to start gimp at boot time. Maybe we should classify frozen-bubble as system-critical as well (it's also in /usr)? Seriously, boot-critical would be something that the system cannot *boot without*, which belongs in /. Everything else should be in /usr, i.e. non-boot-critical. How hard is it to start *non-boot* (system) critical *after* boot (things like sshd)? I do that today... That is over-simplifying the problem and trivializing it. No-one ever said the *everythign* in /usr is criticial for boot. This is the problem: a. There exists code used at boot and early-user space time. It is critical that this code is available when needed. b. One cannot predict with absolute certainty 100% of the time what exactly that critical code is. c. many reasonable setups turn out to have such critical code in /usr, and this cannot be reliably predicted in advance Your second paragraph reveals that you beleive you already know everything you need to have to boot your system. Now do the same for every possible Gentoo user out there and have it work 100% of the time in ALL valid cases. Do you now see the problem and the fulls cope and impact of it? -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Flexibility and robustness in the Linux organisim
On 30/09/2013 08:31, pk wrote: On 2013-09-30 00:04, Alan McKinnon wrote: 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 basically it wasn't broke before stuff started to use the code in /usr. How isn't that breaking? 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. If what you are saying is true then *everything* is broken by design if something isn't available at boot time (may be /usr, may be /var or whatever). I never mentioned /var at all. Go back and read again what I did write. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 30/09/2013 01:08, Dale wrote: 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. And that is your opinon which is pretty much useless and wrong to boot. Dale, I've known you for 7 years. Now get over this init thingy thing you have going. Seriously. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 30/09/2013 01:40, Daniel Campbell wrote: The best path for you seems to be a merge of / and /usr. I asked Alan how to do this since he seemed knowledgeable about it. If he replies, maybe his advice will be handy and save you a lot of trouble. It seems clear to me that you want to avoid trouble, but looking at your options, putting /usr in / is probably the least painful thing you can do, and it won't require an initramfs. I don't like initramfs's either, but that's because I'm lazy and don't like maintaining more than two things (kernel and GRUB config) in order to boot. I think I replied so a similar question from tanstaafl already, but basically all you need to do is boot with a rescue disk, mount /usr somewhere else and copy everything in it to the usr/ directory on / But the devil is in the details and if anything will trip you up it's the extact contents you have there and how much space you have available. I don't know of any script around that automates it, so human eyeballs is what it will take. If you post the output of df -h, du -sh /usr, du -sh /usr/*, mount, and the contents of fstab, loads of folks here can tell you how to proceed. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 30/09/2013 06:14, Walter Dnes wrote: If the udev people had made net ifnames=0 the default, and allowed the small percentage of multi-nic machine admins to set net.ifnames=1, this would not have been an issue. Some corner case exotic setups require complex solutions... no ifs/ands/ors/buts. All the complaining you hear is from the other 99% who's setup worked just fine with the simple solution, suddenly finding the complex solution rammed down their throats. No, that is just plain wrong. Having interfaces on a multi-nic host come up as ethX where X is a mostly random number is just so broken it beggars belief. Trust me, it is zero fun when it happens and what makes it even worse if you have no warning at all beforehand. Go check out FreeBSD sometime and see how they number their nics, and see how it is completely reliable every single time. Check Windows for that matter, they also don't have the problem. Neither does MacOS. All that happened is that Linux and udev got dragged screaming and bitching into the 21st century wrt nic naming, and things are now in a better situation they should have been in many many years ago. But, as usual, people are resistant to change even when the change is something that does indeed need to happen. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] systemd installation location
On Mon, 30 Sep 2013 10:42:37 +0800, Mark David Dumlao wrote: What was /usr's original purpose? /usr was originally the home directory. Programs were moved there because Unix didn't fit into a single disk. http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074114.html Thanks for that link, it does a good job of explaining how we got in this mess. -- Neil Bothwick I spilled Spot remover on my dog. Now he's gone. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Sunday 29 September 2013 14:45:05 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. Then what would be a correct size for the / partition when putting /usr on there as well? I have had no issues with giving / 500MB, /boot another 500MB and have everything else with minimal values on LVM and extending partitions without rebooting the machine whenever necessary. If I am now forced to put /usr on /, detailed steps on how to migrate all my systems succesfully with minimal downtime would be appreciated. Along with a size-indication that will: 1) Always be sufficient 2) Not be a waste of valuable diskspace 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. Dale has, and so have I, see above. 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... Actually, it isn't a corner case. Striping increases performance, I use it as well. Why put all the software that I load when needed (and expect to be thrown out of memory when not used) on a single disk when you have the option to put all that on a RAID0 (striping) set? -- Joost
Re: [gentoo-user] some of the stuff in /usr that's become a problem
On Sun, 29 Sep 2013 22:03:11 -0400, Greg Woodbury wrote: One of the most obvious things that broke booting with a seperate /usr is not GNOMEs fault, but GRUB 2's fault. How so? All the files GRUB2 needs to boot are in /boot and GRUB is out of the picture before the kernel loads or mounts /, let alone does anything else. -- Neil Bothwick A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Mon, 30 Sep 2013 00:14:08 -0400, Walter Dnes wrote: 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. I.e. the 99% who don't need initramfs before today. Some corner case exotic setups require complex solutions... no ifs/ands/ors/buts. All the complaining you hear is from the other 99% who's setup worked just fine with the simple solution, suddenly finding the complex solution rammed down their throats. Separate /usr is broken, maybe faulty would be a better word. It's like software bugs, not everyone hits every bug, if you don't use the buggy bits of the program. But would you rather wait until the program stopped working for you or have the bugs fixed before you ever saw them? Also consider that this is about Gentoo support for separate /usr. They are supporting it now, which means they are spending time on it that could be devoted elsewhere. Their spending that time on it may well be the reason you have been shielded from the problems caused by a separate /usr. All the news item says is that the Gentoo devs are no longer going to do that for you, and they have presented a couple of solutions. You are free to find a third path, or even continue using a separate /usr without initramfs in the hope or belief that it will not break for you. -- Neil Bothwick You are about to give someone a piece of your mind, something you can ill afford... signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 30/09/2013 00:53, Tanstaafl wrote: 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 : ~ # Apart from portage and src that all looks totally normal and unlikely to vary much over time. Is this the official gentoo way now? Will a new/fresh virgin install have /var/portage instead of /usr/portage? The new instaled default is to put all of portage on /var, whilst still supporting old installs on /usr. This is no big deal in code, as it's really just a string containing a base path I can eliminate almost 8GB by moving portage and its storage directories... Or move them onto a dedictaed LV. This is a case where a different mount point makes a lot of sense - we're all aware just how unique the tree is in terms of fs performance - thousands of small files mostly smaller than 2k in hundreds of directories. It's quite different to everything else on /usr or even /var. Same with distfiles, that too can move anywhere you want it to be, just adjust one setting in make.conf I don't recall seeing a news item about that... IIRC it wasn't a news item as such. Perhaps it was an elog from portage itself. 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. It's /var/portage for new installs. If you want it to be somewhere else, just move it and adjust make.conf 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. rsync takes care of all that. You have eclean to keep distfiles tidy binpkgs you need to clean up on your own, as portage has no way of knowing what you want to keep. And local overlays fall in the same category -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
»Q« wrote: On Sun, 29 Sep 2013 10:39:35 -0500 Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: I think I'll update that Kubuntu disk right quick while I am thinking about it. Fall back plan just in case. ;-) Make sure you notify the Kubuntu mailing list of your contingency plans in case Kubuntu's init thingy gives you trouble. ;) Real simple, reinstall. It takes a very short time compared to Gentoo. I used to install Mandrake in about 30 minutes and that was a complete install on much slower hard drives and CD readers. I got that covered. 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 11:36:02PM -0500, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 11:21 PM, Mark David Dumlao madum...@gmail.com wrote: And, on a personal note, I find a little quaint (and somehow naïve) to think about (for example) bluetooth as a corner case, when most of us walk with a bluetooth enabled Linux computer on our pockets. Dalvik != GNU/Linux as we know it. Exactly what percentage of cellphones is running GNU/Linux as we know it, let alone Gentoo? I want Gentoo Linux on my cellphone. And it's probably not going to happen with OpenRC. I used to laugh at Windows users who got their OS dumbed down to a useless mess, all in the name of convergence with smartphones. Now I cry along with them. -- 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
Alan McKinnon wrote: On 30/09/2013 01:08, Dale wrote: 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. And that is your opinon which is pretty much useless and wrong to boot. Dale, I've known you for 7 years. Now get over this init thingy thing you have going. Seriously. Longer than that. LOL 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 30/09/2013 01:31, Daniel Campbell wrote: Curious; how is merging two filesystems done? I don't have a separate /usr and am completely unaffected by this change, but it's somewhat interesting to me. /usr stores some pretty important data on it, and I imagine you'd need to mount it somewhere else in order to move the files from it to /'s /usr dir. Is a Live environment recommended instead? How would you mitigate the leftover partition, assuming it's not adjacent to /'s partition? Because /usr is continually in use, boot using a livecd of your choice. In that environment, use fdisk (or whichever *disk you like) to make any changes to partitions you know you will need. Mount your gentoo / somewhere convenient Mount your gentoo /usr somewhere convenient copy the latter over to the former edit fstab reboot It really is just a case of moving a large number of files around, but because those very files are always in use you have to do it in livecd environment. There's no exact checklist one can follow to guarantee a 100% result blindly. Instead, as this is Gentoo, we assume users built their system knowing what they were doing and can appropriately deal with their config themselves. RAID and LVM for example may need attention, but the user is usually equipped to deal with that and knows what t do. I don't run an initramfs, thankfully, but I keep a pretty simple system in terms of filesystems: /, /boot, and /home. -- Alan McKinnon Systems Engineer^W Technician Infrastructure Services Internet Solutions +27 11 575 7585 -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Slow network transfers ... lost interrupts because of clocksource?
Am 29.09.2013 16:37, schrieb Stefan G. Weichinger: 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? Is there no good suggestion for this?
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 12:57:12AM +0100, Neil Bothwick wrote: On Sun, 29 Sep 2013 18:31:37 -0500, Daniel Campbell wrote: Curious; how is merging two filesystems done? I don't have a separate /usr and am completely unaffected by this change, but it's somewhat interesting to me. /usr stores some pretty important data on it, and I imagine you'd need to mount it somewhere else in order to move the files from it to /'s /usr dir. Is a Live environment recommended instead? How would you mitigate the leftover partition, assuming it's not adjacent to /'s partition? For /usr you don't need a live CD, because the contents of /usr shouldn't change unless you instal/remove something. You can make sure they don't change during the merge by remounting read-only mount /usr -o remount,ro mkdir /newusr rsync -a /usr/ /new/usr/ Comment out /usr line in /etc/fstab mv /usr /oldusr mv /newusr /usr reboot rmdir /oldusr What you do with the old partition is up to you. In this case the discussion was about /usr on LVM, so you just delete it and allocate the space elsewhere when needed. You can even leave out the step of creating a new directory and moving it later if you bind-mount you rootfs somewhere, e.g. /mnt/gentoo. You may want to add some parameters to the call to rsync, though (e.g. those that preserve permissions, xattrs (especially for SELinux or XT-PaX) and owner/group (should be -pogX), possibly -x aswell (if you have other filesystems under /usr (e.g. a discrete FS for the portage tree). This would boil down to: mount /usr -o remout,ro # just to make sure there are no changes mount -o bind / /mnt/gentoo rsync -apogXx /usr/ /mnt/usr/ # possibly fiddle around with the flags comment out the /usr line in fstab reboot if everything's working: delete the old usr-partition (or do with it whatever you like). WKR Hinnerk signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Sunday 29 September 2013 19:36:32 Neil Bothwick wrote: 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. Actually, that is not guaranteed. I remember a situation in the past where boot-critical software required a certain minimal kernel-version with specific config-settings. Without those I could not boot. Inconsistencies can, and will, happen on occasion. -- Joost
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Sunday 29 September 2013 22:09:35 Alan McKinnon 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 :-) 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). I can imagine some of those opinions, I am certain I have uttered the exact same words myself on occasion. It gets worse when those are the ones holding the root-password and refuse to give it to you, even though it is obvious I know how to do things better then they do... 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. The list thanks you :) -- Joost
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Mon, 30 Sep 2013 12:01:27 +0200, Hinnerk van Bruinehsen wrote: mount /usr -o remount,ro mkdir /newusr rsync -a /usr/ /new/usr/ Comment out /usr line in /etc/fstab mv /usr /oldusr mv /newusr /usr reboot rmdir /oldusr What you do with the old partition is up to you. In this case the discussion was about /usr on LVM, so you just delete it and allocate the space elsewhere when needed. You can even leave out the step of creating a new directory and moving it later if you bind-mount you rootfs somewhere, e.g. /mnt/gentoo. Good point. You may want to add some parameters to the call to rsync, though (e.g. those that preserve permissions, xattrs (especially for SELinux or XT-PaX) and owner/group (should be -pogX), -a covers most if not all of those. possibly -x aswell (if you have other filesystems under /usr (e.g. a discrete FS for the portage tree). Another good point, one of those things you think of immediately after hitting Send :( -- Neil Bothwick Middle-age - because your age starts to show at your middle. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Mon, 30 Sep 2013 12:16 +0200, Joost Roeleveld wrote: Installing a new kernel does not magically make the old one break. If that kernel worked yesterday, it will work today. Actually, that is not guaranteed. I remember a situation in the past where boot-critical software required a certain minimal kernel-version with specific config-settings. Without those I could not boot. I don't see how that is an issue with correctly written ebuilds. If you update the kernel, you are increasing the version number and your old one will still work. If you update the software, the ebuild should detect an unsuitable kernel and either warn you or abort. Either way, it is irrelevant whether you are using an initramfs or not. -- Neil Bothwick Be strict when sending and tolerant when receiving. RFC 1958 - Architectural Principles of the Internet - section 3.9 signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 09/30/2013 04:31 AM, Alan McKinnon wrote: On 30/09/2013 01:31, Daniel Campbell wrote: Curious; how is merging two filesystems done? I don't have a separate /usr and am completely unaffected by this change, but it's somewhat interesting to me. /usr stores some pretty important data on it, and I imagine you'd need to mount it somewhere else in order to move the files from it to /'s /usr dir. Is a Live environment recommended instead? How would you mitigate the leftover partition, assuming it's not adjacent to /'s partition? Because /usr is continually in use, boot using a livecd of your choice. In that environment, use fdisk (or whichever *disk you like) to make any changes to partitions you know you will need. Mount your gentoo / somewhere convenient Mount your gentoo /usr somewhere convenient copy the latter over to the former edit fstab reboot It really is just a case of moving a large number of files around, but because those very files are always in use you have to do it in livecd environment. There's no exact checklist one can follow to guarantee a 100% result blindly. Instead, as this is Gentoo, we assume users built their system knowing what they were doing and can appropriately deal with their config themselves. RAID and LVM for example may need attention, but the user is usually equipped to deal with that and knows what t do. I don't run an initramfs, thankfully, but I keep a pretty simple system in terms of filesystems: /, /boot, and /home. My suspicions were mostly correct, then. If the merge is that simple, I see no reason not to do it if one doesn't want to roll an initramfs. However, I imagine moving partitions around in gparted or something similar would be quite a wait if / and /usr weren't adjacent on the drive. Thanks for the simple-but-thorough explanation. :)
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Monday 30 September 2013 10:01:32 Alan McKinnon wrote: On 30/09/2013 06:14, Walter Dnes wrote: If the udev people had made net ifnames=0 the default, and allowed the small percentage of multi-nic machine admins to set net.ifnames=1, this would not have been an issue. Some corner case exotic setups require complex solutions... no ifs/ands/ors/buts. All the complaining you hear is from the other 99% who's setup worked just fine with the simple solution, suddenly finding the complex solution rammed down their throats. No, that is just plain wrong. Having interfaces on a multi-nic host come up as ethX where X is a mostly random number is just so broken it beggars belief. Trust me, it is zero fun when it happens and what makes it even worse if you have no warning at all beforehand. I trust you, but on my multi-nic systems, I found a better solution :) As I use Xen to virtualize my systems and as I don't want to have multiple network cables running side-by-side, I started using VLANs. I know have all the NICs names eth1,eth2,...ethn. I throw them all as a bonded network device: bond0 (the other ends go into a switch supporting bonding network ports) then on top of that, I have VLANs with distinctive names (lan, dmz, guest, vm,...) and link these as required to different Xen-domains. When the network names get renamed suddenly to the non-predictive scheme, my system refuses to boot. Before that, I would use mac-addresses to link ethx devices to names that make sense to me. (see above for the names) -- Joost
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 30/09/2013 12:27, Daniel Campbell wrote: On 09/30/2013 04:31 AM, Alan McKinnon wrote: On 30/09/2013 01:31, Daniel Campbell wrote: Curious; how is merging two filesystems done? I don't have a separate /usr and am completely unaffected by this change, but it's somewhat interesting to me. /usr stores some pretty important data on it, and I imagine you'd need to mount it somewhere else in order to move the files from it to /'s /usr dir. Is a Live environment recommended instead? How would you mitigate the leftover partition, assuming it's not adjacent to /'s partition? Because /usr is continually in use, boot using a livecd of your choice. In that environment, use fdisk (or whichever *disk you like) to make any changes to partitions you know you will need. Mount your gentoo / somewhere convenient Mount your gentoo /usr somewhere convenient copy the latter over to the former edit fstab reboot It really is just a case of moving a large number of files around, but because those very files are always in use you have to do it in livecd environment. There's no exact checklist one can follow to guarantee a 100% result blindly. Instead, as this is Gentoo, we assume users built their system knowing what they were doing and can appropriately deal with their config themselves. RAID and LVM for example may need attention, but the user is usually equipped to deal with that and knows what t do. I don't run an initramfs, thankfully, but I keep a pretty simple system in terms of filesystems: /, /boot, and /home. My suspicions were mostly correct, then. If the merge is that simple, I see no reason not to do it if one doesn't want to roll an initramfs. However, I imagine moving partitions around in gparted or something similar would be quite a wait if / and /usr weren't adjacent on the drive. Indeed, this is the part where it can get hairy, and it all totally depends on how the user decided to lay out their partitions. Eyeballs and brains form the solution here, not computers and scripts :-) Thanks for the simple-but-thorough explanation. :) -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Monday 30 September 2013 11:24:58 Neil Bothwick wrote: On Mon, 30 Sep 2013 12:16 +0200, Joost Roeleveld wrote: Installing a new kernel does not magically make the old one break. If that kernel worked yesterday, it will work today. Actually, that is not guaranteed. I remember a situation in the past where boot-critical software required a certain minimal kernel-version with specific config-settings. Without those I could not boot. I don't see how that is an issue with correctly written ebuilds. If you update the kernel, you are increasing the version number and your old one will still work. If you update the software, the ebuild should detect an unsuitable kernel and either warn you or abort. That is the problem though, the ebuild can't detect that there is an unsuitable kernel still available. Either way, it is irrelevant whether you are using an initramfs or not. I agree, my comment was made to point out that a kernel that worked yesterday, may no longer work tomorrow. -- Joost
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 30/09/2013 12:32, Joost Roeleveld wrote: On Monday 30 September 2013 10:01:32 Alan McKinnon wrote: On 30/09/2013 06:14, Walter Dnes wrote: If the udev people had made net ifnames=0 the default, and allowed the small percentage of multi-nic machine admins to set net.ifnames=1, this would not have been an issue. Some corner case exotic setups require complex solutions... no ifs/ands/ors/buts. All the complaining you hear is from the other 99% who's setup worked just fine with the simple solution, suddenly finding the complex solution rammed down their throats. No, that is just plain wrong. Having interfaces on a multi-nic host come up as ethX where X is a mostly random number is just so broken it beggars belief. Trust me, it is zero fun when it happens and what makes it even worse if you have no warning at all beforehand. I trust you, but on my multi-nic systems, I found a better solution :) As I use Xen to virtualize my systems and as I don't want to have multiple network cables running side-by-side, I started using VLANs. I know have all the NICs names eth1,eth2,...ethn. I throw them all as a bonded network device: bond0 (the other ends go into a switch supporting bonding network ports) then on top of that, I have VLANs with distinctive names (lan, dmz, guest, vm,...) and link these as required to different Xen-domains. When the network names get renamed suddenly to the non-predictive scheme, my system refuses to boot. Before that, I would use mac-addresses to link ethx devices to names that make sense to me. (see above for the names) The worst case that comes to mind was a three zone netflow collector plus the first nic on our management range. If you're familiar with old netflow versions you'll know it is UDP from the router and is touchy about addresses. So we had incoming netflow from three ranges each hitting a dedicated nic and this all worked marvellously for years and years. One day after a routine maintenance window the box came up with all 4 nics scrambled and who knows what was now assigned to what. Forget ssh to log in and fix it - nothing was listening. That took very senior sysadmins on site to deal with, the regular maintenance guy was in way over his head. Business were OK with losing 15 minutes billing and stats data in a maintenance window. They were definitely not OK with losing several hours of it because someone thought assigning names on a non-deterministic discovery order was a good idea. One thing about Dell hardware - you always know exactly what each nic is connected to on the motherboard so with that info the new names are predictable (consistent is actually the better term). Using MAC addresses for the same purposes is clunky and unwieldy, the MACs have to be recorded somewhere and you still don't know which MAC goes with which physical socket. With bus numbers you do know. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
[gentoo-user] poppler - how to update it elegantly?
Hi, my most hated package is poppler. Each time in the past and now again it's hard to upgrade. portage (2.2.7) cannot handle it, so I have to (manually) unmerge all packages depending on it and emerge them after the poppler upgrade again. Has anybody found a more elegant procedure? Many thanks, Helmut.
Re: [gentoo-user] poppler - how to update it elegantly?
On 30/09/2013 13:55, Helmut Jarausch wrote: Hi, my most hated package is poppler. Each time in the past and now again it's hard to upgrade. portage (2.2.7) cannot handle it, so I have to (manually) unmerge all packages depending on it and emerge them after the poppler upgrade again. Has anybody found a more elegant procedure? Many thanks, Helmut. poppler packaging is a pita, but it's never broke anything for me (but does cause lots and lots and lots of stuff to be rebuilt...) Yesterday's update worked just fine: $ genlop -t poppler * app-text/poppler Wed Sep 18 08:46:05 2013 app-text/poppler-0.24.1 merge time: 33 seconds. Sun Sep 29 12:31:08 2013 app-text/poppler-0.24.2 merge time: 35 seconds. What errors are you getting? Any customizations to poppler on your system? (i.e grep -r poppler /etc/portage) -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] poppler - how to update it elegantly?
On 09/30/2013 02:24:40 PM, Alan McKinnon wrote:
On 30/09/2013 13:55, Helmut Jarausch wrote:
Hi, my most hated package is poppler. Each time in the past and now
again it's hard to upgrade.
portage (2.2.7) cannot handle it, so I have to (manually) unmerge
all
packages depending on it and emerge them after
the poppler upgrade again.
Has anybody found a more elegant procedure?
Many thanks,
Helmut.
poppler packaging is a pita, but it's never broke anything for me (but
does cause lots and lots and lots of stuff to be rebuilt...)
Yesterday's update worked just fine:
$ genlop -t poppler
* app-text/poppler
Wed Sep 18 08:46:05 2013 app-text/poppler-0.24.1
merge time: 33 seconds.
Sun Sep 29 12:31:08 2013 app-text/poppler-0.24.2
merge time: 35 seconds.
What errors are you getting?
Any customizations to poppler on your system?
(i.e grep -r poppler /etc/portage)
First, are you using portage-2.2.7?
I haven't changed poppler nor its ebuild in any way.
Here is my problem:
emerge -vp app-text/poppler
These are the packages that would be merged, in order:
Calculating dependencies * waiting for lock on
/var/db/.pkg.portage_lockfile ... [ ok ]
... done!
[ebuild r U ] app-text/poppler-0.24.2:0/43 [0.22.5:0/37] USE=cairo
cjk cxx introspection jpeg lcms png qt4 tiff utils -curl -debug -doc
-jpeg2k 1,470 kB
[ebuild rR] net-print/cups-filters-1.0.36-r2 USE=jpeg png tiff
-perl -static-libs -zeroconf 0 kB
[ebuild rR] dev-tex/luatex-0.76.0 USE=-doc 0 kB
[ebuild rR] app-text/evince-3.8.3:0/evd3.4-evv3.3
USE=introspection postscript tiff -debug -djvu -dvi -gnome-keyring
-nautilus -t1lib -xps 0 kB
[ebuild rR] dev-python/python-poppler-0.12.1-r4 USE=-examples
PYTHON_TARGETS=python2_7 -python2_6 0 kB
[ebuild rR] app-office/calligra-2.7.3:4 USE=crypt eigen exif
fftw fontconfig gif glew glib gsf gsl handbook jpeg jpeg2k kdcraw
kdepim lcms marble mysql okular opengl pdf ssl threads tiff truetype
xbase xml xslt (-aqua) -attica -freetds -openexr -opengtl (-postgres)
-spacenav (-sybase) {-test} -vc -word-perfect
CALLIGRA_FEATURES=author braindump flow karbon kexi krita plan sheets
stage words 0 kB
[ebuild r U ] app-office/libreoffice-4.1.2.2-r1 [4.1.2.2]
USE=bluetooth branding cups dbus gnome gtk java kde opengl vba webdav
(-aqua) -debug -eds -gstreamer -gtk3 -jemalloc -mysql -odk -postgres
-telepathy {-test} LIBREOFFICE_EXTENSIONS=presenter-minimizer
-nlpsolver -scripting-beanshell -scripting-javascript -wiki-publisher
PYTHON_SINGLE_TARGET=python2_7 -python3_3 PYTHON_TARGETS=python2_7
python3_3 0 kB
[ebuild rR] app-text/texlive-core-2013-r1 USE=X doc tk xetex
-cjk -source 0 kB
[ebuild rR] app-office/texmaker-4.0.4 0 kB
Total: 9 packages (2 upgrades, 7 reinstalls), Size of downloads: 1,470
kB
and on a different machine portage couldn't resolve blocking itself.
I'll try this (big) re-emerge later on.
Thanks,
Helmut
Re: [gentoo-user] poppler - how to update it elegantly?
On 30/09/2013 14:37, Helmut Jarausch wrote:
On 09/30/2013 02:24:40 PM, Alan McKinnon wrote:
On 30/09/2013 13:55, Helmut Jarausch wrote:
Hi, my most hated package is poppler. Each time in the past and now
again it's hard to upgrade.
portage (2.2.7) cannot handle it, so I have to (manually) unmerge all
packages depending on it and emerge them after
the poppler upgrade again.
Has anybody found a more elegant procedure?
Many thanks,
Helmut.
poppler packaging is a pita, but it's never broke anything for me (but
does cause lots and lots and lots of stuff to be rebuilt...)
Yesterday's update worked just fine:
$ genlop -t poppler
* app-text/poppler
Wed Sep 18 08:46:05 2013 app-text/poppler-0.24.1
merge time: 33 seconds.
Sun Sep 29 12:31:08 2013 app-text/poppler-0.24.2
merge time: 35 seconds.
What errors are you getting?
Any customizations to poppler on your system?
(i.e grep -r poppler /etc/portage)
First, are you using portage-2.2.7?
Yes
I haven't changed poppler nor its ebuild in any way.
Here is my problem:
emerge -vp app-text/poppler
These are the packages that would be merged, in order:
Calculating dependencies * waiting for lock on
/var/db/.pkg.portage_lockfile ... [ ok ]
... done!
[ebuild r U ] app-text/poppler-0.24.2:0/43 [0.22.5:0/37] USE=cairo
cjk cxx introspection jpeg lcms png qt4 tiff utils -curl -debug -doc
-jpeg2k 1,470 kB
[ebuild rR] net-print/cups-filters-1.0.36-r2 USE=jpeg png tiff
-perl -static-libs -zeroconf 0 kB
[ebuild rR] dev-tex/luatex-0.76.0 USE=-doc 0 kB
[ebuild rR] app-text/evince-3.8.3:0/evd3.4-evv3.3
USE=introspection postscript tiff -debug -djvu -dvi -gnome-keyring
-nautilus -t1lib -xps 0 kB
[ebuild rR] dev-python/python-poppler-0.12.1-r4 USE=-examples
PYTHON_TARGETS=python2_7 -python2_6 0 kB
[ebuild rR] app-office/calligra-2.7.3:4 USE=crypt eigen exif fftw
fontconfig gif glew glib gsf gsl handbook jpeg jpeg2k kdcraw kdepim lcms
marble mysql okular opengl pdf ssl threads tiff truetype xbase xml xslt
(-aqua) -attica -freetds -openexr -opengtl (-postgres) -spacenav
(-sybase) {-test} -vc -word-perfect CALLIGRA_FEATURES=author braindump
flow karbon kexi krita plan sheets stage words 0 kB
[ebuild r U ] app-office/libreoffice-4.1.2.2-r1 [4.1.2.2]
USE=bluetooth branding cups dbus gnome gtk java kde opengl vba webdav
(-aqua) -debug -eds -gstreamer -gtk3 -jemalloc -mysql -odk -postgres
-telepathy {-test} LIBREOFFICE_EXTENSIONS=presenter-minimizer
-nlpsolver -scripting-beanshell -scripting-javascript -wiki-publisher
PYTHON_SINGLE_TARGET=python2_7 -python3_3 PYTHON_TARGETS=python2_7
python3_3 0 kB
[ebuild rR] app-text/texlive-core-2013-r1 USE=X doc tk xetex -cjk
-source 0 kB
[ebuild rR] app-office/texmaker-4.0.4 0 kB
That all looks quite normal - poppler triggered 8 rebuilds.
Is the problem just on the other machine (this one looks fine)?
Total: 9 packages (2 upgrades, 7 reinstalls), Size of downloads: 1,470 kB
and on a different machine portage couldn't resolve blocking itself.
I'll try this (big) re-emerge later on.
Thanks,
Helmut
--
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckin...@gmail.com
[gentoo-user] Re: systemd installation location
pk pete...@coolmail.se wrote: Seriously, boot-critical would be something that the system cannot *boot without*, which belongs in /. Everything else should be in /usr, i.e. non-boot-critical. How hard is it to start *non-boot* (system) critical *after* boot (things like sshd)? I do that today... For somebody who uses sshfs-fuse to mount /usr from another machine, sshd and fuse *are* boot critical. (And yes, this maybe a natural setup for home systems since in many settings this is more secure than using nfs for this.) But even without net-mounting the answer to how hard is it to start ... after boot the answer for modern kernels is: a lot. Modern kernels initialize modules simulataneously (i.e. in an unpredictable order). So you would have to remember and postpone these initializations which can produce all sorts of unexpected problems if you have complicated implicit dependencies. Older versions of udev did this in a somewhat primitive way (restarting failed services again), but obviously this is not a clean solution (since the failing could have other reasons).
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 29.09.2013 20:25, Dale wrote: 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 agree to 100% with you Dale. I have /usr on a separate LVM partition (I only have, as you, / and /boot on regular partitions) to be able to easily extend it (which I have been forced to do a few times). And as my VG-partition starts directly after the /-partition I am not in the position to extend / to engulf all the data in /usr. -- Dan Johansson, http://www.dmj.nu *** This message is printed on 100% recycled electrons! *** 0x2FB894AD.asc Description: application/pgp-keys signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Slow network transfers ... lost interrupts because of clocksource?
Am 30.09.2013 11:54, schrieb Stefan G. Weichinger: Am 29.09.2013 16:37, schrieb Stefan G. Weichinger: 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? Is there no good suggestion for this? let the kernel figure out the best clocksource for you? if you have a real problem with lost interrupts, go to lkml.
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
Am 30.09.2013 01:27, schrieb Dale: Tanstaafl wrote: 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? To me, it doesn't matter why it varies, it just does. After each update, I check to see what the partitions look like. The biggest change was going from KDE3 to KDE4. That seemed to make things grow a good bit. Other things I install/uninstall seem to change things too. 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? No, it doesn't. On Gentoo, I HAVE to make the thing but don't know how to fix it if it breaks. On other distros, I don't have to make the thing. If it fails, at worst, I can reinstall in much less time than I would spend trying to fix the silly thing. Since I don't know how to fix one and can't boot to get help, then the computer may as well be a screen door on a submarine. As I posted before, if something breaks and I can't fix it, I replace it with something else that works. That could be why /usr varies so much too. 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. Actually, history proves that wrong too. I started using LVM because I got tired of having to rearrange my partitions and resize things. That was the whole reason I switched to LVM when I did. Ask anyone on this list that has been here long ehough. I have had to move things around LOTS of times because things grow including /usr and /var. /home is a different and unrelated thing. Funny thing is, I did it several times and never even posted about it. 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... See above. 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. And what you are saying is not changing anything either. I don't want to mess with the init thingy. If I do, first time it fails and a solution isn't obvious, time to move on to something else. I like my 16 year old washing machine and I have repaired things on it a few times. If it breaks and I can't fix it, time for a new washing machine. Most likely, a different brand and model too. Dale :-) :-) 500gb harddisks are extremely cheap. 150gb for / with usr and you will be fine for ages. Why are you acting like this is a problem?
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
Am 30.09.2013 11:00, schrieb Alan McKinnon: On 30/09/2013 00:53, Tanstaafl wrote: 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 : ~ # Apart from portage and src that all looks totally normal and unlikely to vary much over time. Is this the official gentoo way now? Will a new/fresh virgin install have /var/portage instead of /usr/portage? The new instaled default is to put all of portage on /var, whilst still supporting old installs on /usr. This is no big deal in code, as it's really just a string containing a base path I can eliminate almost 8GB by moving portage and its storage directories... Or move them onto a dedictaed LV. This is a case where a different mount point makes a lot of sense - we're all aware just how unique the tree is in terms of fs performance - thousands of small files mostly smaller than 2k in hundreds of directories. It's quite different to everything else on /usr or even /var. Same with distfiles, that too can move anywhere you want it to be, just adjust one setting in make.conf I don't recall seeing a news item about that... IIRC it wasn't a news item as such. Perhaps it was an elog from portage itself. 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. It's /var/portage for new installs. If you want it to be somewhere else, just move it and adjust make.conf really? so when I moved PORTDIR to /var/portage I was ahead of the rest? Wow...
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 2013-09-30 1:10 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann volkerar...@googlemail.com wrote: 150gb for / with usr and you will be fine for ages. I'm curious what a common/average size is for desktops... My /usr, without portage files, is @ 5GB. My current / is only 83M, so even after I merge /usr into it, it will still be only @ 5GB... But, this is a server, so... For an average desktop, loaded with software (say, KDE, Libreoffice, etc), how much will /usr grow to? Or more specifically, what is a *reasonable* maximum one could expect?
Re: [gentoo-user] Managing multiple systems with identical hardware
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. 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. That sounds about right. To get a feel for how it works, visit puppet's web site and download some of the test appliances they have there and run them in vm software. Set up a server and a few clients, and start experimenting in that sandbox. You'll quickly get a feel for how it all hangs together (it's hard to describe in text how puppet gets the job done, so much easier to do it for real and watch the results) Puppet seems like overkill for what I need. I think all I really need is something to manage config file differences and user accounts. At this point I'm thinking I shouldn't push packages themselves, but portage config files and then let each laptop emerge unattended based on those portage configs. I'm going to bring this to the 'salt' mailing list to see if it might be a good fit. It seems like a much lighter weight application. I'm soaking up a lot of your time (again). I'll return with any real Gentoo questions I run into and to run down the final plan before I execute it. Thanks so much for your help. Not sure what I'd do without you. :) - Grant
Re: [gentoo-user] Slow network transfers ... lost interrupts because of clocksource?
Am 30.09.2013 19:07, schrieb Volker Armin Hemmann: Am 30.09.2013 11:54, schrieb Stefan G. Weichinger: Am 29.09.2013 16:37, schrieb Stefan G. Weichinger: 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? Is there no good suggestion for this? let the kernel figure out the best clocksource for you? if you have a real problem with lost interrupts, go to lkml. I am gonna reboot the system without forcing any clocksource after my current emerge -e @system (I did that to fit the transferred VM-image to the given hardware/CPU). And I will maybe upgrade to 3.10.7-r1 as well. What is the best way to transfer multi-GB-files in LAN? I don't really need encryption here ... thanks, Stefan
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
Am 30.09.2013 19:25, schrieb Tanstaafl: On 2013-09-30 1:10 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann volkerar...@googlemail.com wrote: 150gb for / with usr and you will be fine for ages. I'm curious what a common/average size is for desktops... My /usr, without portage files, is @ 5GB. My current / is only 83M, so even after I merge /usr into it, it will still be only @ 5GB... But, this is a server, so... For an average desktop, loaded with software (say, KDE, Libreoffice, etc), how much will /usr grow to? Or more specifically, what is a *reasonable* maximum one could expect? my whole / with KDE, libreoffice, ut2004 in /opt and /usr/src having several linux versions in it but without PORTDIR is: /dev/root59G 33G 24G 58% / 10G are /opt 18G are /usr 5.4G are /usr/src
Re: [gentoo-user] Slow network transfers ... lost interrupts because of clocksource?
On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 07:36:35PM +0200, Stefan G. Weichinger wrote: What is the best way to transfer multi-GB-files in LAN? I don't really need encryption here ... My choice is always rsync -av /source/ user@IP:~/destination/ because it won't copy a corrupt file. Make sure you understand the use of slash first. And the -av is going to preserve timestamps and give you verbose output. If you also want to see status of your copying add --progress. -- 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] Slow network transfers ... lost interrupts because of clocksource?
On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 07:36:35PM +0200, Stefan G. Weichinger wrote: What is the best way to transfer multi-GB-files in LAN? I don't really need encryption here ... Did not mention rsync has: -n, --dry-run perform a trial run with no changes made as well as many other options...man rsync. -- 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] systemd installation location
On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 2:24 PM, pk pete...@coolmail.se wrote: On 2013-09-30 04:05, Mark David Dumlao wrote: are the same. Distro packagers, however, have to decide for 100% of the cases. So they're going to end up making weird decisions that are easy for you to second-guess but are actually tough. That's only true for binary distros. That is not true. Even in source-based distros like gentoo, distro packagers decide where the files go. So far, it's only in a completely from scratch *nix environment where the end user gets to decide where files go. And where do the files go is pretty much what made this problem be apparent. Many packages with udev rules depend on programs, resources, libraries in /usr. It is _not_ trivial to fix those packages. If _you_ think it is, I recommend you replace the entire gentoo bugzilla community because you are clearly a rockstar bugfixer. If you want to solve the hard problem, you want to create a tool that will automate / and /usr migrations. Portage has to be aware of the tool What's wrong with using autotools? I really don't see why you need it to be dynamic. In Gentoo you install stuff once for every version (or if you change use flag). Why invent stuff/complicate matters when you don't need to? You do not really understand the scope of the problem. The problem is that boot critical is subjective to the system. A program that is boot critical for one system may not be boot critical for another. But where software gets installed is generally hard coded into packages (defaulting to /usr). That is the status quo. Because of this, the package manager simply does not have enough information on whether a package is boot critical or not. It is not part of the ebuild. It is not part of the emerge switches. Not only that, whether a package is boot critical or not could change at any time. nfs-utils are only boot critical if you use nfs. ssh is only boot critical if you use sshfs. Perl is only boot critical if you have a startup script that counts the number of virgins you've sacrificed to the goat god. Making a filesystem boot-critical is something that the package manager does not and cannot track. Autotools also cannot track it as it happens outside of compile time. If you want the / and /usr separation nonsense solved, you should write a program that can mark a binary as boot-critical. It will then copy the binary and all of its libraries to /, and copy and rebuild any dependencies into / as well. It must be a full copy, otherwise the promise that /usr can be shared will be violated. Everytime that package is rebuilt, it must be built and copied into _both_ / and /usr. Your program should also be able to unmark a binary as boot critical and thus delete any copies in / Your program should be understood by portage, or at least run as a portage hook. Copy paste that to all package managers as well. What's more, any program depending on a boot critical program must be rewritten so that it looks for the program in the correct path. For backwards compatibility, a boot critical program should generate\ symlinks in the / filesystem's /usr tree (the normally empty directory shadowed by the /usr filesystem), so that if the /usr filesystem is not available any programs depending on that program would still work. That program is writable in theory. It's VERY tedious to write it, much less test that it works. -- This email is:[ ] actionable [x] fyi[ ] social Response needed: [ ] yes [x] up to you [ ] no Time-sensitive: [ ] immediate[ ] soon [x] none
Re: [gentoo-user] Slow network transfers ... lost interrupts because of clocksource?
Am 30.09.2013 19:46, schrieb Bruce Hill: On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 07:36:35PM +0200, Stefan G. Weichinger wrote: What is the best way to transfer multi-GB-files in LAN? I don't really need encryption here ... Did not mention rsync has: -n, --dry-run perform a trial run with no changes made as well as many other options...man rsync. Thanks for both replies ... I know all these options already and use them regularly ... exactly these commands stall after a while and get really slow throughput. I am currently rebooting the upgraded machine ...
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 12:38 AM, Dan Johansson dan.johans...@dmj.nu wrote: On 29.09.2013 20:25, Dale wrote: 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 agree to 100% with you Dale. I have /usr on a separate LVM partition (I only have, as you, / and /boot on regular partitions) to be able to easily extend it (which I have been forced to do a few times). And as my VG-partition starts directly after the /-partition I am not in the position to extend / to engulf all the data in /usr. Peeps using LVM: If, right now, you were forced to boot into /, without /usr, would you be able to manually assemble your usr using pv/vg/lv tools - without the assistance of udev? The gentoo warning is simply saying that they don't have enough people to devote to debugging problems where that happens. So if you so love your / rescue systems, you can make a very early init script - before udev - that mounts /usr. And you could host it on an overlay if you want or submit it into gentoo bugzilla as a proposal. It isn't unsupported in that they're going to make sure it doesn't work. It's unsupported in that they don't have the resources to fix bugs caused by that. -- This email is:[ ] actionable [x] fyi[ ] social Response needed: [ ] yes [x] up to you [ ] no Time-sensitive: [ ] immediate[ ] soon [x] none
Re: [gentoo-user] Slow network transfers ... lost interrupts because of clocksource?
Am 30.09.2013 19:07, schrieb Volker Armin Hemmann: Am 30.09.2013 11:54, schrieb Stefan G. Weichinger: Am 29.09.2013 16:37, schrieb Stefan G. Weichinger: 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? Is there no good suggestion for this? let the kernel figure out the best clocksource for you? if you have a real problem with lost interrupts, go to lkml. After reboot without any clocksource options it still choses hpet and it still shows: [ 1747.393960] hpet1: lost 2 rtc interrupts [ 1747.452994] hpet1: lost 1 rtc interrupts [ 1747.481786] hpet1: lost 1 rtc interrupts [ 1747.527556] hpet1: lost 1 rtc interrupts [ 1747.660527] hpet1: lost 1 rtc interrupts [ 1747.726264] hpet1: lost 1 rtc interrupts :-( I would be very happy to get some hints how to debug this ...
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 30/09/2013 19:25, Tanstaafl wrote: On 2013-09-30 1:10 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann volkerar...@googlemail.com wrote: 150gb for / with usr and you will be fine for ages. I'm curious what a common/average size is for desktops... My /usr, without portage files, is @ 5GB. My current / is only 83M, so even after I merge /usr into it, it will still be only @ 5GB... But, this is a server, so... For an average desktop, loaded with software (say, KDE, Libreoffice, etc), how much will /usr grow to? Or more specifically, what is a *reasonable* maximum one could expect? The big space hogs are: /usr/lib* /usr/share/ most of that comes from KDE and Gnome. Both systems are huge and bundle lots of accessory files - best descriptive word I could find. The main culprit by far is artwork - themes, wallpaper, sound themes, icon collections and so on. Second is marble, celestia and similar geo* type apps with their maps. I'd say 20G total is a) lots more than you'd actually need even with tons of unneeded artwork and b) a tiny fraction of the smallest (spinning) disk you can buy these days. So 20G is a good upper limit to start with. Marble and celestia users can bump it up according to their needs - anyone who has detailed maps of the entire Earth's land surface likely already knows how much disk space it takes up :-) -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 30/09/2013 19:25, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: 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. It's /var/portage for new installs. If you want it to be somewhere else, just move it and adjust make.conf really? so when I moved PORTDIR to /var/portage I was ahead of the rest? Wow... You were ahead of me for sure :-) I clearly remember one day long long ago you ranted and raved about how a huge chunk of /usr was write-often... ... so I fiddled with mine to make it work on /var too and was very happy with it. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Managing multiple systems with identical hardware
On 09/30/2013 06:31 PM, Grant wrote: 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. 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. That sounds about right. To get a feel for how it works, visit puppet's web site and download some of the test appliances they have there and run them in vm software. Set up a server and a few clients, and start experimenting in that sandbox. You'll quickly get a feel for how it all hangs together (it's hard to describe in text how puppet gets the job done, so much easier to do it for real and watch the results) Puppet seems like overkill for what I need. I think all I really need is something to manage config file differences and user accounts. At this point I'm thinking I shouldn't push packages themselves, but portage config files and then let each laptop emerge unattended based on those portage configs. I'm going to bring this to the 'salt' mailing list to see if it might be a good fit. It seems like a much lighter weight application. I'm soaking up a lot of your time (again). I'll return with any real Gentoo questions I run into and to run down the final plan before I execute it. Thanks so much for your help. Not sure what I'd do without you. :) - Grant maybe someone could chip in re: experience with distributed compilation and cached compiles? https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Distcc http://ccache.samba.org/ this may be closer to what you are looking for ?
Re: [gentoo-user] Managing multiple systems with identical hardware
On 30/09/2013 19:31, Grant wrote: 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. 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. That sounds about right. To get a feel for how it works, visit puppet's web site and download some of the test appliances they have there and run them in vm software. Set up a server and a few clients, and start experimenting in that sandbox. You'll quickly get a feel for how it all hangs together (it's hard to describe in text how puppet gets the job done, so much easier to do it for real and watch the results) Puppet seems like overkill for what I need. I think all I really need is something to manage config file differences and user accounts. At this point I'm thinking I shouldn't push packages themselves, but portage config files and then let each laptop emerge unattended based on those portage configs. I'm going to bring this to the 'salt' mailing list to see if it might be a good fit. It seems like a much lighter weight application. Two general points I can add: 1. Sharing config files turns out to be really hard. By far the easiest way is to just share /etc but that is an all or nothing approach, and you just need one file to be different to break it. Like /etc/hostname You *could* create a share directory inside /etc and symlink common files in there, but that gets very tedious quickly. Rather go for a centralized repo solution that pushes configs out, you must just find the one that's right for you. 2. Binary packages are almost perfect for your needs IMHO, running emerge gets very tedious quickly, and your spec is that all workstations have the same USE. You'd be amazed how much time you save by doing this: emerge -b on your laptop and share your /var/packages emerge -K on the workstations when your laptop is on the network step 2 goes amazingly quickly - eyeball the list to be emerged, they should all be purple, press enter. About a minute or two per workstation, as opposed to however many hours the build took. 3. (OK, three points). Share your portage tree over the network. No point in syncing multiple times when you actually just need to do it once. I'm soaking up a lot of your time (again). I'll return with any real Gentoo questions I run into and to run down the final plan before I execute it. Thanks so much for your help. Not sure what I'd do without you. :) I'm sure Neil would step in if I'm hit by a bus He'd say the same things, and use about 1/4 of the words it takes me ;-) -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Flexibility and robustness in the Linux organisim
On 2013-09-30 09:32, Alan McKinnon wrote: I never mentioned /var at all. Go back and read again what I did write. I'm quite aware what you wrote. If you only read what I wrote... English is not my native language but the word *may* surely cannot be misunderstood? Ok, I'll make it simple: If *something1* at boot time requires access to *something2* at boot time that isn't available then I would say that *something1* is broken by design not the *something2*. So I would argue that devs relying on /usr always being there have broken the system. Best regards Peter K
Re: [gentoo-user] Managing multiple systems with identical hardware
On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 09:31:18PM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: (or big chunks of it) over to your other workstations. Puppet seems like overkill for what I need. I think all I really need is something to manage config file differences and user accounts. At this point I'm thinking I shouldn't push packages themselves, but portage config files and then let each laptop emerge unattended based on those portage configs. I'm going to bring this to the 'salt' mailing list to see if it might be a good fit. It seems like a much lighter weight application. Two general points I can add: 1. Sharing config files turns out to be really hard. By far the easiest way is to just share /etc but that is an all or nothing approach, and you just need one file to be different to break it. Like /etc/hostname You *could* create a share directory inside /etc and symlink common files in there, but that gets very tedious quickly. How about using something like unison? I've been using it for a while now to sync a specific subset of ~ between three computers. It allows for exclude rules for host-specific stuff. -- Gruß | Greetings | Qapla’ Please do not share anything from, with or about me with any Facebook service. No, you *can’t* call 999 now. I’m downloading my mail. signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Slow network transfers ... lost interrupts because of clocksource?
Am 30.09.2013 20:23, schrieb Stefan G. Weichinger: [ 1747.393960] hpet1: lost 2 rtc interrupts [ 1747.452994] hpet1: lost 1 rtc interrupts [ 1747.481786] hpet1: lost 1 rtc interrupts [ 1747.527556] hpet1: lost 1 rtc interrupts [ 1747.660527] hpet1: lost 1 rtc interrupts [ 1747.726264] hpet1: lost 1 rtc interrupts :-( I would be very happy to get some hints how to debug this ... booted with hpet=disable ... so far no more lost interrupts in dmesg. I will simply let the scp take its time over night ... and I hope the KVM-performance will be OK when I start the converted VM. S
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On 30.09.2013 20:09, Mark David Dumlao wrote: Peeps using LVM: If, right now, you were forced to boot into /, without /usr, would you be able to manually assemble your usr using pv/vg/lv tools - without the assistance of udev? Sure can!!! -- Dan Johansson, http://www.dmj.nu *** This message is printed on 100% recycled electrons! *** 0x2FB894AD.asc Description: application/pgp-keys signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Mon, 30 Sep 2013 13:25:57 -0400, Tanstaafl wrote: On 2013-09-30 1:10 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann volkerar...@googlemail.com wrote: 150gb for / with usr and you will be fine for ages. I'm curious what a common/average size is for desktops... My /usr, without portage files, is @ 5GB. My current / is only 83M, so even after I merge /usr into it, it will still be only @ 5GB... But, this is a server, so... For an average desktop, loaded with software (say, KDE, Libreoffice, etc), how much will /usr grow to? Or more specifically, what is a *reasonable* maximum one could expect? My desktop % df /usr Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on silastic/usr zfs32G 15G 17G 48% /usr My laptop % df /usr Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on bangbang/usr zfs16G 9.1G 6.6G 59% /usr Both with KDE and LO, but no portage. $PORTDIR is on /var, $DISTDIR and $PKGDIR are on an NFS mount. -- Neil Bothwick There are some ideas so idiotic that only an intellectual could believe them George Orwell signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: 500gb harddisks are extremely cheap. 150gb for / with usr and you will be fine for ages. Why are you acting like this is a problem? Maybe cheap for you but not so for me. I'm on a fixed income, disabled. Also, my brother has cancer and I'm taking him to treatments that are about 75 miles away one way. I'm buying gas since he can't work much if any right now either. Right now, buying anything computer related is out of the question. I got much more important things to deal wtih. I'm certainly not going to be able to do that in the next 30 days. So, computer, Gentoo as well, is pretty low on the priority list. I suspect I will be bootable for a good while but have a plan B if needed. 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 Mon, 30 Sep 2013 18:38:36 +0200, Dan Johansson wrote: I agree to 100% with you Dale. I have /usr on a separate LVM partition (I only have, as you, / and /boot on regular partitions) to be able to easily extend it (which I have been forced to do a few times). And as my VG-partition starts directly after the /-partition I am not in the position to extend / to engulf all the data in /usr. It's possible, even without an external drive, but a fair bit more work, provided you have enough free space in your VG to be able to reduce it. -- Neil Bothwick GOTO: (n.) an efficient and general way of controlling a program, much despised by academics and others whose brains have been ruined by overexposure to Pascal. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Managing multiple systems with identical hardware
On Mon, 30 Sep 2013 21:31:18 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: I'm soaking up a lot of your time (again). I'll return with any real Gentoo questions I run into and to run down the final plan before I execute it. Thanks so much for your help. Not sure what I'd do without you. :) I'm sure Neil would step in if I'm hit by a bus He'd say the same things, and use about 1/4 of the words it takes me ;-) So far in this thread, I've managed about 0/4 of the words you've used... Oh damn! But yes, a build host and adding --usepkg=y to EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS in make.conf gives a massive speed increase. Run the build host in an easily recovered environment, like a VM, and you don't even have to monitor the world update on it, just run a script in the early hours that does emerge --sync emerge -uXX @world and check your mailbox for errors before running emerge on the clients. The use clusterssh or dsh to update them all at once. -- Neil Bothwick Q. How many radical feminists does it take to change a light bulb? A. Two - one to change the bulb and one to write a book about the passive role of the socket. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
Am 30.09.2013 22:48, schrieb Dale: Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: 500gb harddisks are extremely cheap. 150gb for / with usr and you will be fine for ages. Why are you acting like this is a problem? Maybe cheap for you but not so for me. I'm on a fixed income, disabled. Also, my brother has cancer and I'm taking him to treatments that are about 75 miles away one way. I'm buying gas since he can't work much if any right now either. Right now, buying anything computer related is out of the question. I got much more important things to deal wtih. I'm certainly not going to be able to do that in the next 30 days. So, computer, Gentoo as well, is pretty low on the priority list. I suspect I will be bootable for a good while but have a plan B if needed. Dale :-) :-) you are talking to a person whose income is only slightly above social security levels and I am still be able to buy an adequate hdd once in a while.
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Flexibility and robustness in the Linux organisim
On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 09:40:45PM +0200, pk wrote If *something1* at boot time requires access to *something2* at boot time that isn't available then I would say that *something1* is broken by design not the *something2*. What about the case where *something2* *USED TO BE AVAILABLE, BUT HAS BEEN MOVED TO /USR* ? So I would argue that devs relying on /usr always being there have broken the system. So I would argue that unnecessarily moving stuff into /usr is deliberate sabotage, designed to break *something1*. -- Walter Dnes waltd...@waltdnes.org I don't run desktop environments; I run useful applications
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Monday 30 Sep 2013 20:14:44 Alan McKinnon wrote: On 30/09/2013 19:25, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: 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. It's /var/portage for new installs. If you want it to be somewhere else, just move it and adjust make.conf really? so when I moved PORTDIR to /var/portage I was ahead of the rest? Wow... You were ahead of me for sure :-) I clearly remember one day long long ago you ranted and raved about how a huge chunk of /usr was write-often... ... so I fiddled with mine to make it work on /var too and was very happy with it. There's no reason to move /usr/portage to / It can stay in your LVM. -- Regards, Mick signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [gentoo-user] systemd installation location
On 2013-09-30 08:45, Alan McKinnon wrote: That is over-simplifying the problem and trivializing it. No-one ever said the *everythign* in /usr is criticial for boot. Is it really over-simplyfying it? How am I supposed to know whatever comes next? Someone (upstream) *may* find it boot-critical to have 'Space Invaders' operational during boot. Yes, I say that somewhat *tounge-in-cheek* but the way things are going I'm not so sure anymore... This is the problem: a. There exists code used at boot and early-user space time. It is critical that this code is available when needed. I fully understand this and *if* I ever were to install code that I *knew* had this dependency I would take a serious look if I really *need* it and only then install it. But it would be up to me to make that decision and take the necessary steps. b. One cannot predict with absolute certainty 100% of the time what exactly that critical code is. In a general manner, no, you are correct... Also, see above (Invaders)... (And if you don't understand what I'm trying to say, I'm saying this is as *arbitrary* as it gets - which you, like me, seem to be opposed to[arbitrariness]) c. many reasonable setups turn out to have such critical code in /usr, and this cannot be reliably predicted in advance So I avoid things like Gnome, pulseaudio, systemd and similar stuff like the plague but I *still* shall be forced to use whatever is dictated by these things[1]? Don't get me wrong, if anyone wants to install Gnome or whatever then they should have the restrictions required by it. Your second paragraph reveals that you beleive you already know everything you need to have to boot your system. Now do the same for every possible Gentoo user out there and have it work 100% of the time in ALL valid cases. I *do* know everything I need to have to boot my system. I carefully select my hardware and I take particular care of how I set up my system thank you very much. But apparently my system is no longer deemed a valid case... so I'm obviously not a possible Gentoo user anymore. Do you now see the problem and the fulls cope and impact of it? I've seen it since *long* before this thread started. The main problem is lack of resources (because of stupid decisions upstream which puts a burden on Gentoo devs) and I can't (currently) help much with that other than through monetary means (donations) but since Gentoo seems to go the way of the dodo for me (or assimilated if you will) then I will take my leave. For a while now it has only been inertia keeping me here. Or maybe a hope that things will get better... [1] And no, I'm not blaming systemd, Gnome or any of the other pests in particular for this... Best regards Peter K
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Flexibility and robustness in the Linux organisim
On Mon, 30 Sep 2013 17:05:39 -0400, Walter Dnes wrote: If *something1* at boot time requires access to *something2* at boot time that isn't available then I would say that *something1* is broken by design not the *something2*. What about the case where *something2* *USED TO BE AVAILABLE, BUT HAS BEEN MOVED TO /USR* ? What about the case where something1 wasn't required at boot time but changed circumstances mean it now is? So I would argue that devs relying on /usr always being there have broken the system. So I would argue that unnecessarily moving stuff into /usr is deliberate sabotage, designed to break *something1*. Define unnecessarily in that context? You can't, not for all use cases. There are many files that clearly need to be available early on, and many more that clearly do not. Between them is a huge grey area, files that some need and some don't, that may be needed now or at some indeterminate point in the future. If you put everything that may conceivably be needed at early boot into /, you shift a large chunk of /usr/*bin/ and /usr/lib* into /, effectively negating the point of a small, lean /. That puts us right back where we started, try to define a point of separation that cannot be defined. initramfs is the new /, for varying values of new since most distros have been doing it that way for well over a decade. -- Neil Bothwick He's dead, Jim. You get his phaser, I'll grab his wallet. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
On Mon, 30 Sep 2013 23:05:29 +0100, Mick wrote: really? so when I moved PORTDIR to /var/portage I was ahead of the rest? Wow... You were ahead of me for sure :-) I clearly remember one day long long ago you ranted and raved about how a huge chunk of /usr was write-often... ... so I fiddled with mine to make it work on /var too and was very happy with it. There's no reason to move /usr/portage to / It can stay in your LVM. This isn't about moving it to /, it's about moving it to /var, which is a far more logical location for the portage tree. /usr is for static system files, /var is for variable data. -- Neil Bothwick What's the difference between ignorance and apathy? I don't know and I don't care signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] systemd installation location
On Tue, 01 Oct 2013 00:14:55 +0200, pk wrote: Your second paragraph reveals that you beleive you already know everything you need to have to boot your system. Now do the same for every possible Gentoo user out there and have it work 100% of the time in ALL valid cases. I *do* know everything I need to have to boot my system. I carefully select my hardware and I take particular care of how I set up my system thank you very much. But apparently my system is no longer deemed a valid case... so I'm obviously not a possible Gentoo user anymore. Actually you are. No one said that your setup would no longer work, only that it would no longer be supported by the devs. Since you know exactly what you want and how to get it, that shouldn't be a problem as you support it yourself. Come November you will be running an unsupported setup, just like I am now and have been for most of this year. But my system hasn't stopped working. Well it did once and I had to fix it myself, that's all. -- Neil Bothwick A computer is like an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy. -- Joseph Campbell signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Flexibility and robustness in the Linux organisim
El 30/09/13 00:47, Volker Armin Hemmann escribió: 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. Ohh, but they are inspired on YOUR analogy, so guess how wrong yours was. 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. Please provide some reference about Initially /usr was added because one harddisk was full. without it your statement is moot to me. The setup of a separate /usr on a networked system was used in amongst other places a few swedish universities. 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. That's why you move /var/log, not /var 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
[gentoo-user] Sloppy sterm screen update over ssh
I've recently noticed when ssh'ing into another machine that the xterm display doesn't fully update. I.e. there are holes where an app updates over a previous screen. I've tried Google, but any mention of screen is interpreted as the screen utility. -- Walter Dnes waltd...@waltdnes.org I don't run desktop environments; I run useful applications
[gentoo-user] Package Create on remote Host
Hello, i have a Rootserver with Power. Can i built package on this Host and send Package to my Notebooks? Can i built Packages on the Root without local install? I has read about distcc and other way with NFS. But NFS over Network not the best and sounds complicate. Thank you Nice Day Silvio
Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01
Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: Am 30.09.2013 22:48, schrieb Dale: Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: 500gb harddisks are extremely cheap. 150gb for / with usr and you will be fine for ages. Why are you acting like this is a problem? Maybe cheap for you but not so for me. I'm on a fixed income, disabled. Also, my brother has cancer and I'm taking him to treatments that are about 75 miles away one way. I'm buying gas since he can't work much if any right now either. Right now, buying anything computer related is out of the question. I got much more important things to deal wtih. I'm certainly not going to be able to do that in the next 30 days. So, computer, Gentoo as well, is pretty low on the priority list. I suspect I will be bootable for a good while but have a plan B if needed. Dale :-) :-) you are talking to a person whose income is only slightly above social security levels and I am still be able to buy an adequate hdd once in a while. As I said, I got other more important things to deal with right now. My money is going to that not hard drives. 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 Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 09:47:46PM +0100, Neil Bothwick wrote: My desktop % df /usr Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on silastic/usr zfs32G 15G 17G 48% /usr My laptop % df /usr Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on bangbang/usr zfs16G 9.1G 6.6G 59% /usr Both with KDE and LO, but no portage. $PORTDIR is on /var, $DISTDIR and $PKGDIR are on an NFS mount. Do you have some alias causing df output to use -h or how does that work? -- 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] Re: Flexibility and robustness in the Linux organisim
On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 7:21 AM, Francisco Blas Izquierdo Riera (klondike) klond...@gentoo.org wrote: 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. Please provide some reference about Initially /usr was added because one harddisk was full. without it your statement is moot to me. http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074114.html -- This email is:[ ] actionable [x] fyi[ ] 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
On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 1:11 PM, Mark David Dumlao madum...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 7:21 AM, Francisco Blas Izquierdo Riera (klondike) klond...@gentoo.org wrote: 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. Please provide some reference about Initially /usr was added because one harddisk was full. without it your statement is moot to me. http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074114.html Bell Labs notes on Unix. Search for usr and you'll notice it was originally for home directories. http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/notes.html -- This email is:[ ] actionable [x] fyi[ ] social Response needed: [ ] yes [x] up to you [ ] no Time-sensitive: [ ] immediate[ ] soon [x] none
