Re: [blfs-support] BLFS-8.1 with new kernel patches

[Paul Rogers via blfs-support]

I know nobody has been holding their breath for this report, after all, these 
old Core 2 Duo "Conroe" aren't even identified by Intel as CPUs with 
speculative execution flaws that they're NOT going to fix!  But Google does 
index our list, so for the benefit of others...

After a significant amount of testing, I found good evidence that the 
Firefox-55 crashes on some Yahoo.com/finance pages, and that error message, 
were _not_ caused by the 4.14.134 patch to an LFS-8.1 system on a Conroe.  I 
purged that system and started fresh with a clean install of my 8.1 "distro".  
With my "pio" package manager (which _does_ work) I cleanly removed its 4.14.62 
default kernel and incrementally patched with .98.  Firefox seemed stable.  So 
I did it again with .134, and again Firefox seems stable.  I didn't find out 
that _did_ cause the crashes, but again pio proved the X, GTK, Firefox chain 
had not been corrupted.  Perhaps something in my user configuration?

So, in short and for the benefit of anybody else making old kit work, more 
testing showed my suspicions were wrong, and 4.14.134 does seem to work.  Later 
patches are _not_ incompatible with these old CPUs.

-- 
Paul Rogers
paulgrog...@fastmail.fm
Rogers' Second Law: "Everything you do communicates."
(I do not personally endorse any additions after this line. TANSTAAFL :-)
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Re: [blfs-support] BLFS-8.1 with new kernel patches

[Richard Melville via blfs-support]

On Tue, 30 Jul 2019 at 11:19, Michael Shell via blfs-support <
blfs-support@lists.linuxfromscratch.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 30 Jul 2019 10:20:24 +0100
> Richard Melville via blfs-support 
> wrote:
>
> > There's also Startpage and Qwant
>
>
> Thanks for those! But, Startpage does rely on Google's engine,
> and Qwant on Bing's:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startpage.com
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwan 


Qwant claims to have only used Bing during its development stage.  Whether
that's true or not I really don't know.  However, they do have close ties
with MS, and they use its "Azure Cloud".

Richard
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Re: [blfs-support] BLFS-8.1 with new kernel patches

[Michael Shell via blfs-support]

On Tue, 30 Jul 2019 10:20:24 +0100
Richard Melville via blfs-support  
wrote:

> There's also Startpage and Qwant


Thanks for those! But, Startpage does rely on Google's engine,
and Qwant on Bing's:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startpage.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant


I also forgot to mention the Russian search engine:

https://yandex.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yandex_Search

Yandex is impressive.


  Mike
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Re: [blfs-support] BLFS-8.1 with new kernel patches

[Richard Melville via blfs-support]

On Tue, 30 Jul 2019 at 09:08, Michael Shell via blfs-support <
blfs-support@lists.linuxfromscratch.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 25 Jul 2019 20:55:18 +0100
> Ken Moffat via blfs-support 
> wrote:
>
> > Sorry, I've no idea for what to search for (current google mostly
> > returns results for multiple terms with one of the crossed through
> > in the 'must include' underneath the summary.
>
>
> FWIW, Google is really, really going downhill for all
> non-brain-dead users, to the point of being scary:
>
> https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/azcdp7/google_sucks_now/
>
> DuckDuckGo is improving as an alternative:
>
> https://duckduckgo.com/
>
> And GNU/FSF's distributed peer-to-peer search engine, Yacy,
>
> http://search.yacy.net/
> http://yacy.searchlab.eu/
> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/29/yacy_google_open_source_engine/
>
> is supposedly quite good for computer and open source software
> queries, but not so much for more mainstream stuff.
>
> In any case, if Google keeps going on its current course,
> it will no longer be a usable search tool. It already is
> a shadow of what it was in the late 90's and early 2000's.
>

There's also Startpage and Qwant

Richard
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Re: [blfs-support] BLFS-8.1 with new kernel patches

[Michael Shell via blfs-support]

On Thu, 25 Jul 2019 20:55:18 +0100
Ken Moffat via blfs-support  wrote:

> Sorry, I've no idea for what to search for (current google mostly
> returns results for multiple terms with one of the crossed through
> in the 'must include' underneath the summary.


FWIW, Google is really, really going downhill for all
non-brain-dead users, to the point of being scary:

https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/azcdp7/google_sucks_now/

DuckDuckGo is improving as an alternative:

https://duckduckgo.com/

And GNU/FSF's distributed peer-to-peer search engine, Yacy, 

http://search.yacy.net/
http://yacy.searchlab.eu/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/29/yacy_google_open_source_engine/

is supposedly quite good for computer and open source software
queries, but not so much for more mainstream stuff.

In any case, if Google keeps going on its current course,
it will no longer be a usable search tool. It already is
a shadow of what it was in the late 90's and early 2000's.


  Cheers,

  Mike Shell
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Re: [blfs-support] BLFS-8.1 with new kernel patches

[Paul Rogers via blfs-support]

Suspicions confirmed, I suspect.  I installed my 8.1 distro on my old i7, 
brought it up to speed, and went to a couple Yahoo Finance pages.  It didn't 
crash.  I'll have to play with it more to see if I can persuade it, but it 
looks like I may have to do a binary search for a patch between 62 & 134 that 
won't crash on this Conroe, then fork my release for different CPUs.  Should 
only take 7 tries max.  That's the worst reason ever for forking one of my 
distros!

-- 
Paul Rogers
paulgrog...@fastmail.fm
Rogers' Second Law: "Everything you do communicates."
(I do not personally endorse any additions after this line. TANSTAAFL :-)
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Re: [blfs-support] BLFS-8.1 with new kernel patches

[Paul Rogers via blfs-support]

> If you were using PaX, and indeed hardened gentoo, then you would be a
> very long way from what most people here are doing.  I will be very
> surprised if that is the case.

Indeed you should!  ;-)  No, I'm not using PaX, just that page suggests that 
things it's doing to harden a system cause Firefox to crash with this error 
message I'm also getting, and the only change here is going from patch level 62 
to 134, which is patching hardware vulnerabilities of this Core2 Duo Conroe.  
I'm speculating the kernel patches are doing about what PaX does that crashes 
Firefox.

[16:56 Documentation]$ ls admin-guide/hw-vuln/
index.rst  l1tf.rst  mds.rst  spectre.rst
[16:57 ~]$ cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/*
Mitigation: PTE Inversion
Vulnerable: Clear CPU buffers attempted, no microcode; SMT disabled
Mitigation: PTI
Vulnerable
Mitigation: __user pointer sanitization
Mitigation: Full generic retpoline, STIBP: disabled, RSB filling

>It might also be that changes at the problematic pages happened
>independently, and this is the first time you've visited them since
>changing the kernel.  If so, booting the previous kernel (if that is
>all you changed) will test that.

Indeed so.  I made a new, fresh installation on a clean partition so there's no 
contamination.  No other changes.  (Does bringing across everything in 
/home/paul count?)  I do indeed still have the system at patchlevel 62 running, 
and it doesn't crash.

The pages are at yahoo.com/finance, et al., which itself crashes.  But then 
it's calling a bunch of other stuff to present.  The email client page I'm 
using at this moment doesn't crash, nor does the BLFS list archive.

> But in all seriousness, I don't think 8.1 has any reasonable desktop
> usage now, other than to allow you to build a current LFS.

It does do all I need it to do.  I'm afraid it'll have to do.  My 75th birthday 
was last month, 2 days before D-Day.  (Brits probably remember that better than 
Americans.)  We all age at our own rate.  I find I'm making mental mistakes I 
never should.  Building a "POD-9.0" would be a more complex juggling act than 
I'd be advised to attempt.

I haven't installed this version on an i7 yet.  Possibly one of these kernel 
patches that causes problems on this Conroe would be compatible with my 
Bloomfield & Sandy Bridge.  If  that works I could fork this for i7's, and try 
an intermediate kernel patch for the Conroe.  But it'd be nice to resolve this.

-- 
Paul Rogers
paulgrog...@fastmail.fm
Rogers' Second Law: "Everything you do communicates."
(I do not personally endorse any additions after this line. TANSTAAFL :-)
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Re: [blfs-support] BLFS-8.1 with new kernel patches

[Ken Moffat via blfs-support]

On Thu, Jul 25, 2019 at 09:54:21AM -0700, Paul Rogers via blfs-support wrote:
> It seemed like a good idea to update with new kernel patches, 4.14.134 
> specifically, to catch mitigations for the CPU flaws.  Suddenly 
> Firefox-55.0.3 began crashing on certain pages.  My console began showing 
> errors related to force_s3tc_enable.  That seems to be a red-herring though.  
> One of the pages turned up by a search related his problem to a hardened 
> Gentoo and PaX , which sounds about right for mine.  I can't figure out a 
> good set of keywords for a search though, so I thought I'd ask if anyone has 
> similar experience or a suggestion.  (I generally follow this list, but don't 
> recall something like this, perhaps because it didn't seem relevant at the 
> time.)
> 

If you were using PaX, and indeed hardened gentoo, then you would be
a very long way from what most people here are doing.  I will be
very surprised if that is the case.  Current PaX (grsecurity) is
only available to paying customers.  Hardened gentoo probably
includes fun things like RELRO as well as simpler hardening such
what I wrote about in the blfs-dev book this week (at the end of
Notes on Building Software).

I perhaps found the same link: the adblock plus extension was
crashing, starting in safe mode allowed the page to load (together
with its ads, obviously).

It might also be that changes at the problematic pages happened
independently, and this is the first time you've visited them since
changing the kernel.  If so, booting the previous kernel (if that is
all you changed) will test that.

But in all seriousness, I don't think 8.1 has any reasonable desktop
usage now, other than to allow you to build a current LFS.

Sorry, I've no idea for what to search for (current google mostly
returns results for multiple terms with one of the crossed through
in the 'must include' underneath the summary.

ĸen
-- 
One pill makes you larger, And one pill makes you small.
And the ones that mother gives you, Don't do anything at all.
Go ask Alice, When she's ten feet tall.
   -- Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit
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