Re: [gentoo-user] switch from gnome/systemd to xfce/openrc borked my system - I GIVE UP
Raffaele Belardi wrote: At this point of the boot process the system did very few things, the problem should be relatively easy to trace so I refuse to give up. Long nights ahead. And at this point of the day I give up. My findings: - the 'random: crng init done' printed during the boot is the kernel, not OpenRC. The OpenRC script just manages the seed and does not print that string. So, most probably OpenRC is never started. - from the chroot I invoked /sbin/openrc . It spits out errors due to the chroot environment but other than that seems to work fine for all runlevels. So the init scripts and /sbin/openrc are fine. - I also issued startxfce4 from the chroot and got a 'working' GUI. Not very useful but I was curious. - one of the init scripts complained that it was unable to open /run and actually the directory was not present. Possibly it was deleted as a side effect of the system crash? Anyway, I restored it but no luck. - I grub-loaded a different kernel, one built for systemd. It stops in the exact same place as the openrc-built one. - I recompiled the kernel with openrc and systemd options and made sure it was loaded (renamed the image file, got grub error, renamed it back, grub happy). I increased the kernel (I think console message) log level but nothing useful was output. - /sbin/init is the next possible failure point but without logs there's not much to debug. I re-emerged sysvinit and openrc but no go. Ok, I've had enough. Thanks to all who contributed, this issue will remain a mystery. raffaele
Re: [gentoo-user] switch from gnome/systemd to xfce/openrc borked my system
On Mon, Aug 19, 2019 at 10:42 AM Raffaele Belardi wrote: > > Rich Freeman wrote: > > Next time you do something like this, keep in mind that Gnome and xfce > > can co-exist on the same system, and so can openrc and systemd. > > Good point, I did not know, in particular for the init systems I thought it > was exactly > the opposite. > The only area of incompatibility I'm aware of are the sysvinit-compatibility links. Both sysvinit and systemd provide implementations of common utilities like poweroff, halt, reboot, telinit, and so on. There is also init itself. The versions that come with sysvinit are compatible with both sysvinit and systemd. If you don't have sysvinit then systemd can supply these. Systemd itself doesn't require these utilities but they are useful both for compatibility and convenience. (ie "systemctl poweroff" works fine, as does sending the command via dbus, but scripts or sysadmins might prefer to be able to just run "poweroff"). The versions of these supplied by systemd are not compatible with sysvinit. A USE flag toggles whether systemd installs these utilities. If it does then it blocks sysvinit. So, you just have to switch that USE flag to install the two in parallel. If you don't have systemd install "init" then you do need to have a kernel command line to launch systemd directly as init. Offhand I think that is really the only conflict between the two. Systemd doesn't use anything but those compatibility utils from sysvinit but it doesn't mind them being around, and nothing in sysvinit/openrc should even notice that systemd is installed. As long as you set the USE flag appropriately you can dual-boot between the two very easily. The only gotcha is keeping all your configs up-to-date as openrc and systemd store things in different places. When you install systemd it takes a snapshot of many of your openrc settings but that is a one-time operation. Some of those settings are hard to change if systemd isn't running as PID 1 - I think the wiki has instructions for how to do this. -- Rich
Re: [gentoo-user] switch from gnome/systemd to xfce/openrc borked my system
Rich Freeman wrote: Next time you do something like this, keep in mind that Gnome and xfce can co-exist on the same system, and so can openrc and systemd. Good point, I did not know, in particular for the init systems I thought it was exactly the opposite. At this point you're probably just going to want to troubleshoot what you are left with, though you could consider reverting back to your old config and starting over if you have backups/etc. Backups? I'm a software developer, I can't afford spending time making backups (just kidding). At this point of the boot process the system did very few things, the problem should be relatively easy to trace so I refuse to give up. Long nights ahead. I imagine that not many people move from systemd to openrc, since the latter is basically the default on Gentoo already. If I were going to migrate a working system between the two I would probably do it stepwise: Ha, this is the HOWTO I was looking for yesterday! Oh well, it'll be for next time. Now, on a new install or a host I didn't care so much about uptime for I'd probably do it your way, and just revert to a backup. In a Not really production environment but I have to fix it before the other users (the kids) come back from vacation or my reputation will quickly sink! raffaele
Re: [gentoo-user] switch from gnome/systemd to xfce/openrc borked my system
On Mon, Aug 19, 2019 at 2:29 AM Raffaele Belardi wrote: > > Yesterday I tried to switch my ~amd64 box from Gnome/systemd to Xfce/openrc. > I followed > the wiki [1], [2] to install Xfce from a Gnome terminal: > > - switch profile from 17.1/desktop/gnome/systemd to 17.1/desktop > - emerge xfce4-meta and some xfce4 applications/panels/extras > - unmerged systemd and emerged OpenRC > - emerge -uDvN world to account for the different profile flags Next time you do something like this, keep in mind that Gnome and xfce can co-exist on the same system, and so can openrc and systemd. At this point you're probably just going to want to troubleshoot what you are left with, though you could consider reverting back to your old config and starting over if you have backups/etc. I imagine that not many people move from systemd to openrc, since the latter is basically the default on Gentoo already. If I were going to migrate a working system between the two I would probably do it stepwise: 1. Rebuild the kernel with support for both systemd and openrc. Boot that (under systemd) and confirm it is working. 2. Install xfce and get that working fine (under systemd). That really has no tie-in to the service manager but if you have this working it is one less thing to mess with and it simplifies your system. 3. Install openrc and reboot under systemd just to make sure everything is still working fine. I forget what the defaults are but you might need to tweak your systemd USE flags so that it uses the sysvinit versions of halt/reboot/poweroff/telinit and so on. It works just fine with its own version of these tools or with sysvinit. 4. Make sure you have your openrc configured the way you want it (I don't think it has any issues with using rc-update and so on while systemd is running, but I haven't tried that). 5. Switch your kernel command line to boot with openrc, and make a note of what it said before. If it boots fine you're now running openrc and just have to clean up the stuff you don't want. If it doesn't boot you just have to edit your command line and you're back up and running with systemd until you sort it out. 6. Switch your profile, do the -uDvN to rebuild anything impacted, and depclean the stuff you don't need. Reboot to test. By doing it this way you will be just making one change at a time with a reboot in-between so that you know what broke if something breaks. The way you did it is potentially more time-efficient, but if something breaks you are going to be hunting to figure out what it was. Since all the packages you're changing are capable of co-existing there is no reason to switch cold turkey. Now, on a new install or a host I didn't care so much about uptime for I'd probably do it your way, and just revert to a backup. In a production environment where reboots are a concern I'd be working out the procedure on a test host. Oh, yeah, and step 0 is to make a backup... :) -- Rich
Re: [gentoo-user] switch from gnome/systemd to xfce/openrc borked my system
David Haller wrote: Hello, On Mon, 19 Aug 2019, Raffaele Belardi wrote: [..] During the emerge I had to hard reset the system [3] which obviously did not boot so I found a PCLinuxOS live cd from 2014 and managed to chroot into the partially updated system. I resumed the emerge successfully, unmerged gnome and dependencies (this almost took more than building Xfce...), rebuilt the kernel with the init system set to OpenRC (make && make install), Did you also install the modules? (make modules_install) Did you update the initrd? No modules here, everything built in. Also no initrd. Why not use 'genkernel'? The default-config should work in your case, but you might look at the config anyway (/etc/genkernel.conf), e.g. at the BOOTLOADER variable. Then 'cd' to your kernel-sources-dir and run 'genkernel --kerneldir=. all'. I've always compiled the kernel directly so I am not familiar with genkernel. But I'll look again into my kernel's config and make sure it is the right kernel that's being loaded. raffaele
Re: [gentoo-user] switch from gnome/systemd to xfce/openrc borked my system
Hello, On Mon, 19 Aug 2019, Raffaele Belardi wrote: [..] >During the emerge I had to hard reset the system [3] which obviously did not >boot so I found a PCLinuxOS live cd from 2014 and managed to chroot into the >partially updated system. I resumed the emerge successfully, unmerged gnome >and dependencies (this almost took more than building Xfce...), rebuilt the >kernel with the init system set to OpenRC (make && make install), Did you also install the modules? (make modules_install) Did you update the initrd? Why not use 'genkernel'? The default-config should work in your case, but you might look at the config anyway (/etc/genkernel.conf), e.g. at the BOOTLOADER variable. Then 'cd' to your kernel-sources-dir and run 'genkernel --kerneldir=. all'. HTH, -dnh -- You know, I found myself right where I left me...
