Re: [gentoo-user] Problem compiling freemind
On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 6:46 AM, Peter Humphrey wrote: > Hello List, > > I thought I'd have a play with a mind mapping program, so I tried to > install freemind on this ~amd64 box. This is an excerpt from the log: > > > Can someone who knows more Java than I do see what's missing? > > This may help: > > $ java-config -L > The following VMs are available for generation-2: > 1) IcedTea6-bin 1.7 [icedtea6-bin] > *) Sun JDK 1.5.0.22 [sun-jdk-1.5] > > -- > Rgds > Peter. > > Runs for me. I don't know how to use it but the GUI comes up and it allows me to start creating something. AMD64 stable except for a few packages. m...@firefly ~/Desktop $ java-config -L The following VMs are available for generation-2: 1) IcedTea6-bin 1.6.2 [icedtea6-bin] *) Sun JRE 1.6.0.17 [sun-jre-bin-1.6] VMs marked as Build Only may contain Security Vulnerabilities and/or be EOL. Gentoo recommends not setting these VMs as either your System or User VM. Please see http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/java.xml#build-only for more information m...@firefly ~/Desktop $ m...@firefly ~/Desktop $ cat /etc/portage/package.keywords sys-kernel/gentoo-sources ~amd64 sys-apps/portage ~amd64 sys-apps/sandbox ~amd64 app-cdr/cdrtools ~amd64 x11-misc/read-edid ~amd64 sys-kernel/rt-sources ~amd64 media-sound/alsa-tools ~amd64 games-action/extreme-tuxracer ~amd64 media-sound/jack-audio-connection-kit ~amd64 dev-php5/php-gtk ~amd64 media-tv/huludesktop ~amd64 m...@firefly ~/Desktop $ - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Problem compiling freemind
On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 7:06 AM, Mark Knecht wrote: > On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 6:46 AM, Peter Humphrey > wrote: >> Hello List, >> >> I thought I'd have a play with a mind mapping program, so I tried to >> install freemind on this ~amd64 box. This is an excerpt from the log: >> > >> >> Can someone who knows more Java than I do see what's missing? >> >> This may help: >> >> $ java-config -L >> The following VMs are available for generation-2: >> 1) IcedTea6-bin 1.7 [icedtea6-bin] >> *) Sun JDK 1.5.0.22 [sun-jdk-1.5] >> >> -- >> Rgds >> Peter. >> >> > Runs for me. I don't know how to use it but the GUI comes up and it > allows me to start creating something. > > AMD64 stable except for a few packages. > > m...@firefly ~/Desktop $ java-config -L > The following VMs are available for generation-2: > 1) IcedTea6-bin 1.6.2 [icedtea6-bin] > *) Sun JRE 1.6.0.17 [sun-jre-bin-1.6] > > VMs marked as Build Only may contain Security Vulnerabilities and/or be EOL. > Gentoo recommends not setting these VMs as either your System or User VM. > Please see http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/java.xml#build-only for more > information > m...@firefly ~/Desktop $ > > m...@firefly ~/Desktop $ cat /etc/portage/package.keywords > sys-kernel/gentoo-sources ~amd64 > sys-apps/portage ~amd64 > sys-apps/sandbox ~amd64 > app-cdr/cdrtools ~amd64 > x11-misc/read-edid ~amd64 > sys-kernel/rt-sources ~amd64 > media-sound/alsa-tools ~amd64 > games-action/extreme-tuxracer ~amd64 > media-sound/jack-audio-connection-kit ~amd64 > dev-php5/php-gtk ~amd64 > media-tv/huludesktop ~amd64 > m...@firefly ~/Desktop $ > > > - Mark > NOTE: It also worked the same for me when I switched to Iced-Tea6-bin, both stable and ~amd64. m...@firefly ~/Desktop $ java-config -L The following VMs are available for generation-2: *) IcedTea6-bin 1.6.2 [icedtea6-bin] 2) Sun JRE 1.6.0.17 [sun-jre-bin-1.6] VMs marked as Build Only may contain Security Vulnerabilities and/or be EOL. Gentoo recommends not setting these VMs as either your System or User VM. Please see http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/java.xml#build-only for more information m...@firefly ~/Desktop $ m...@firefly ~/Desktop $ java-config -L The following VMs are available for generation-2: *) IcedTea6-bin 1.7 [icedtea6-bin] 2) Sun JRE 1.6.0.17 [sun-jre-bin-1.6] VMs marked as Build Only may contain Security Vulnerabilities and/or be EOL. Gentoo recommends not setting these VMs as either your System or User VM. Please see http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/java.xml#build-only for more information m...@firefly ~/Desktop $ m...@firefly ~/Desktop $ java-config -l [ant-core] Java-based build tool similar to 'make' that uses XML configuration files. (/usr/share/ant-core/package.env) [cyrus-sasl-2] The Cyrus SASL (Simple Authentication and Security Layer). (/usr/share/cyrus-sasl-2/package.env) [db-4.7] Oracle Berkeley DB (/usr/share/db-4.7/package.env) [antlr] A parser generator for C++, C#, Java, and Python (/usr/share/antlr/package.env) [gjdoc] A javadoc compatible Java source documentation generator. (/usr/share/gjdoc/package.env) [xulrunner-1.9] Mozilla runtime package that can be used to bootstrap XUL+XPCOM applications (/usr/share/xulrunner-1.9/package.env) [pdflib-5] A library for generating PDF on the fly. (/usr/share/pdflib-5/package.env) [subversion] Advanced version control system (/usr/share/subversion/package.env) [pilot-link] suite of tools for moving data between a Palm device and a desktop (/usr/share/pilot-link/package.env) [freemind] Mind-mapping software written in Java (/usr/share/freemind/package.env) [libidn] Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) implementation (/usr/share/libidn/package.env) m...@firefly ~/Desktop $ Cheers, Mark Cheers, Mark
[gentoo-user] 1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? -> bar performance so far
Hi, I got a WD 1T drive to use in a new machine for my dad. I didn't pay a huge amount of attention to the technical details when I purchased it other than it was SATA2, big, and the price was good. Here's the NewEgg link: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136490 I installed the drive, created some partitions and set off to put ext3 on it using just mke2fs -j /dev/sda3. The partitions gets written and everything works but when I started installing Gentoo on it I was getting some HUGE delays at times, such as when unpacking portage.latest.tar.bz. Basically the tar step would be rolling along and then the drive would literally appear to stop for 1 minute before proceeding. No CPU usage, the machine is alive in other terminals, but anything directed at the disk just seems dead. Sticking my ear on the drive it doesn't sound like the drive is doing anything. I was trying to determine what to do - I.e is this a bad drive, how to return it, etc. - and started reading the reviews at NewEgg. One guy using it with Linux had this to say: 4KB physical sectors: KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING! Pros: Quiet, cool-running, big cache Cons: The 4KB physical sectors are a problem waiting to happen. If you misalign your partitions, disk performance can suffer. I ran benchmarks in Linux using a number of filesystems, and I found that with most filesystems, read performance and write performance with large files didn't suffer with misaligned partitions, but writes of many small files (unpacking a Linux kernel archive) could take several times as long with misaligned partitions as with aligned partitions. WD's advice about who needs to be concerned is overly simplistic, IMHO, and it's flat-out wrong for Linux, although it's probably accurate for 90% of buyers (those who run Windows or Mac OS and use their standard partitioning tools). If you're not part of that 90%, though, and if you don't fully understand this new technology and how to handle it, buy a drive with conventional 512-byte sectors! Now, I don't mind getting a bit dirty learning to use this correctly but I'm wondering what that means in a practical sense. Reading the mke2fs man page the word 'sector' doesn't come up. It's my understanding the Linux 'blocks' are groups of sectors. True? If the disk must use 4K sectors then what - the smallest block has to be 4K and I'm using 1 sector per block? It seems that ext3 doesn't support anything larger than 4K? As a test I blew away all the partitions and made one huge 1 terabyte partition using ext3. I think tried untarring the portage snapshot and then deleting the directory where I put it a bunch of times. I get very different times each time I do this. untarring varies from 6 minutes 24 seconds to 10 minutes 25 seconds. Removing the directory varies from 3 seconds to 1 minute 22 seconds. Every time there is an apparent delay I just see the hard drive light turned on solid. That said as far as I know if I wait for things to complete the data is there but I haven't tested it extensively. Is this a bad drive or am I somehow using it incorrectly? Thanks, Mark gandalf TestMount # time tar xjf /mnt/TestMount/portage-latest.tar.bz2 -C /mnt/TestMount/usr real6m24.736s user0m9.969s sys 0m3.537s gandalf TestMount # time rm -rf /mnt/TestMount/usr/ real0m3.229s user0m0.110s sys 0m1.809s gandalf TestMount # mkdir usr gandalf TestMount # time tar xjf /mnt/TestMount/portage-latest.tar.bz2 -C /mnt/TestMount/usr real7m50.193s user0m8.647s sys 0m2.811s gandalf TestMount # time rm -rf /mnt/TestMount/usr/ real0m3.234s user0m0.119s sys 0m1.792s gandalf TestMount # mkdir usr gandalf TestMount # time tar xjf /mnt/TestMount/portage-latest.tar.bz2 -C /mnt/TestMount/usr real10m25.926s user0m8.645s sys 0m2.765s gandalf TestMount # time rm -rf /mnt/TestMount/usr/ real1m22.330s user0m0.124s sys 0m1.810s gandalf TestMount # mkdir usr gandalf TestMount # time tar xjf /mnt/TestMount/portage-latest.tar.bz2 -C /mnt/TestMount/usr real8m12.307s user0m8.463s sys 0m2.708s gandalf TestMount # time rm -rf /mnt/TestMount/usr/ real0m29.517s user0m0.114s sys 0m1.810s gandalf TestMount # gandalf ~ # hdparm -tT /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: Timing cached reads: 11362 MB in 2.00 seconds = 5684.46 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 314 MB in 3.00 seconds = 104.64 MB/sec gandalf ~ #
Re: [gentoo-user] Problem compiling freemind
On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 9:16 AM, Peter Humphrey wrote: > On Sunday 07 February 2010 15:06:37 Mark Knecht wrote: > >> Runs for me. I don't know how to use it but the GUI comes up and it >> allows me to start creating something. > > Hmm. After switching to iced-tea I get the same compile error* but the GUI > comes up and the program appears to work. What the hell. > > * [javac] Compiling 100 source files to /tmp/portage/app- > misc/freemind-0.9.0_rc6/work/freemind/binding/classes > [echo] Running binding compiler... > [bind] Failed setting classpath from Ant task > > > Thanks for the reply, Mark. > > -- > Rgds > Peter. > > What do you see with java-config -l ? In my previous response it showed some ant stuff. Seems like that's possibly part of the difference? Note that I didn't look very hard for compile errors or anything else. If you want me to let me know what to look for. I just built it and ran it. Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] 1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? -> bar performance so far
On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 9:30 AM, Alexander wrote: > On Sunday 07 February 2010 19:27:46 Mark Knecht wrote: > >> Every time there is an apparent delay I just see the hard drive >> light turned on solid. That said as far as I know if I wait for things >> to complete the data is there but I haven't tested it extensively. >> >> Is this a bad drive or am I somehow using it incorrectly? >> > > Is there any related info in dmesg? > > No, nothing in dmesg at all. Here are two tests this morning. The first is to the 1T drive, the second is to a 120GB drive I'm currently using as a system drive until I work this out: gandalf TestMount # time tar xjf /mnt/TestMount/portage-latest.tar.bz2 -C /mnt/TestMount/usr real8m13.077s user0m8.184s sys 0m2.561s gandalf TestMount # m...@gandalf ~ $ time tar xjf /mnt/TestMount/portage-latest.tar.bz2 -C /home/mark/Test_usr/ real0m39.213s user0m8.243s sys 0m2.135s m...@gandalf ~ $ 8 minutes vs 39 seconds! The amount of data written appears to be the same: gandalf ~ # du -shc /mnt/TestMount/usr/ 583M/mnt/TestMount/usr/ 583Mtotal gandalf ~ # m...@gandalf ~ $ du -shc /home/mark/Test_usr/ 583M/home/mark/Test_usr/ 583Mtotal m...@gandalf ~ $ I did some reading at the WD site and it seems this drive does use the 4K sector size. The way it's done is the addressing on cable is still 512 byte 'user sectors', but they are packed into 4K physical sectors and internal hardware does the mapping. I suspect the performance issue is figuring out how to get the file system to keep things on 4K boundaries. I assume that's what the 4K block size is for when building the file system but I need to go find out more about that. I did not select it specifically. Maybe I need to. Thanks, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] 1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? -> bar performance so far
On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 10:19 AM, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: > On Sonntag 07 Februar 2010, Alexander wrote: >> On Sunday 07 February 2010 19:27:46 Mark Knecht wrote: >> > Every time there is an apparent delay I just see the hard drive >> > >> > light turned on solid. That said as far as I know if I wait for things >> > to complete the data is there but I haven't tested it extensively. >> > >> > Is this a bad drive or am I somehow using it incorrectly? >> >> Is there any related info in dmesg? > > or maybe there is too much cached and seeking is not the drives strong point > ... It's an interesting question. There is new physical seeking technology in this line of drives which is intended to reduce power and noise, but it seem unlikely to me that WD would purposely make a drive that's 10-20x slower than previous generations. Could be though... Are there any user space Linux tools that can test that? The other thing I checked out was that when the block size is not specified it seems that mke2fs uses the default values from /etc/mke2fs.conf and my file says blocksize = 4096 so it would seem to me that if all partitions use blocks then at least the partitions would be properly aligned. My question about that would be when I write a 1 byte file to this drive do I use all 4K of the block it's written in? It's wasteful, but faster, right? I want files to be block-aligned so that the drive isn't doing lots of translation to get the right data. It seems that's been the problem with these drives in the Windows world so WD had to release updated software to get the Windows disk formatters to do things right, or so I think. Thanks Volker. Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] 1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? -> bar performance so far
On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 11:39 AM, Willie Wong wrote: > On Sun, Feb 07, 2010 at 08:27:46AM -0800, Mark Knecht wrote: >> >> 4KB physical sectors: KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING! >> >> Pros: Quiet, cool-running, big cache >> >> Cons: The 4KB physical sectors are a problem waiting to happen. If you >> misalign your partitions, disk performance can suffer. I ran >> benchmarks in Linux using a number of filesystems, and I found that >> with most filesystems, read performance and write performance with >> large files didn't suffer with misaligned partitions, but writes of >> many small files (unpacking a Linux kernel archive) could take several >> times as long with misaligned partitions as with aligned partitions. >> WD's advice about who needs to be concerned is overly simplistic, >> IMHO, and it's flat-out wrong for Linux, although it's probably >> accurate for 90% of buyers (those who run Windows or Mac OS and use >> their standard partitioning tools). If you're not part of that 90%, >> though, and if you don't fully understand this new technology and how >> to handle it, buy a drive with conventional 512-byte sectors! >> >> >> Now, I don't mind getting a bit dirty learning to use this >> correctly but I'm wondering what that means in a practical sense. >> Reading the mke2fs man page the word 'sector' doesn't come up. It's my >> understanding the Linux 'blocks' are groups of sectors. True? If the >> disk must use 4K sectors then what - the smallest block has to be 4K >> and I'm using 1 sector per block? It seems that ext3 doesn't support >> anything larger than 4K? > > The problem is not when you are making the filesystem with mke2fs, but > when you partitioned the disk using fdisk. I'm sure I am making some > small mistakes in the explanation below, but it goes something like > this: > > a) The harddrive with 4K sectors allows the head to efficiently > read/write 4K sized blocks at a time. > b) However, to be compatible in hardware, the harddrive allows 512B > sized blocks to be addressed. In reality, this means that you can > individually address the 8 512B-sized chunks of the 4K sized blocks, > but each will count as a separate operation. To illustrate: say the > hardware has some sector X of size 4K. It has 8 addressable slots > inside X1 ... X8 each of size 512B. If your OS clusters read/writes on > the 512B level, it will send 8 commands to read the info in those 8 > blocks separately. If your OS clusters in 4K, it will send one > command. So in the stupid analysis I give here, it will take 8 times > as long for the 512B addressing to read the same data, since it will > take 8 passes, and each time inefficiently reading only 1/8 of the > data required. Now in reality, drives are smarter than that: if all 8 > of those are sent in sequence, sometimes the drives will cluster them > together in one read. > c) A problem occurs, however, when your OS deals with 4K clusters but > when you make the partition, the partition is offset! Imagine the > physical read sectors of your disk looking like > > > > but when you make your partitions, somehow you partitioned it > > > > This is possible because the drive allows addressing by 512K chunks. > So for some reason one of your partitions starts halfway inside a > physical sector. What is the problem with this? Now suppose your OS > sends data to be written to the block. If it were completely > aligned, the drive will just go kink-move the head to the block, and > overwrite it with this information. But since half of the block is > over the phsical sector, and half over , what the disk now > needs to do is to > > pass 1) read > pass 2) modify the second half of to match the first half of > pass 3) write > pass 4) read > pass 5) modify the first half of to match the second half of > pass 6) write > > Or what is known as a read-modify-write operation. Thus the disk > becomes a lot less efficient. > > -- > > Now, I don't know if this is the actual problem is causing your > performance problems. But this may be it. When you use fdisk, it > defaults to aligning the partition to cylinder boundaries, and use the > default (from ancient times) value of 63 x (512B sized) sectors per > track. Since 63 is not evenly divisible by 8, you see that quite > likely some of your partitions are not aligned to the physical sector > boundaries. > > If you use cfdisk, you can try to change the geometry wit
Re: [gentoo-user] 1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? -> bar performance so far
On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 11:39 AM, Willie Wong wrote: > On Sun, Feb 07, 2010 at 08:27:46AM -0800, Mark Knecht wrote: >> >> 4KB physical sectors: KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING! >> >> Pros: Quiet, cool-running, big cache >> >> Cons: The 4KB physical sectors are a problem waiting to happen. If you >> misalign your partitions, disk performance can suffer. I ran >> benchmarks in Linux using a number of filesystems, and I found that >> with most filesystems, read performance and write performance with >> large files didn't suffer with misaligned partitions, but writes of >> many small files (unpacking a Linux kernel archive) could take several >> times as long with misaligned partitions as with aligned partitions. >> WD's advice about who needs to be concerned is overly simplistic, >> IMHO, and it's flat-out wrong for Linux, although it's probably >> accurate for 90% of buyers (those who run Windows or Mac OS and use >> their standard partitioning tools). If you're not part of that 90%, >> though, and if you don't fully understand this new technology and how >> to handle it, buy a drive with conventional 512-byte sectors! >> >> >> Now, I don't mind getting a bit dirty learning to use this >> correctly but I'm wondering what that means in a practical sense. >> Reading the mke2fs man page the word 'sector' doesn't come up. It's my >> understanding the Linux 'blocks' are groups of sectors. True? If the >> disk must use 4K sectors then what - the smallest block has to be 4K >> and I'm using 1 sector per block? It seems that ext3 doesn't support >> anything larger than 4K? > > The problem is not when you are making the filesystem with mke2fs, but > when you partitioned the disk using fdisk. I'm sure I am making some > small mistakes in the explanation below, but it goes something like > this: > > a) The harddrive with 4K sectors allows the head to efficiently > read/write 4K sized blocks at a time. > b) However, to be compatible in hardware, the harddrive allows 512B > sized blocks to be addressed. In reality, this means that you can > individually address the 8 512B-sized chunks of the 4K sized blocks, > but each will count as a separate operation. To illustrate: say the > hardware has some sector X of size 4K. It has 8 addressable slots > inside X1 ... X8 each of size 512B. If your OS clusters read/writes on > the 512B level, it will send 8 commands to read the info in those 8 > blocks separately. If your OS clusters in 4K, it will send one > command. So in the stupid analysis I give here, it will take 8 times > as long for the 512B addressing to read the same data, since it will > take 8 passes, and each time inefficiently reading only 1/8 of the > data required. Now in reality, drives are smarter than that: if all 8 > of those are sent in sequence, sometimes the drives will cluster them > together in one read. > c) A problem occurs, however, when your OS deals with 4K clusters but > when you make the partition, the partition is offset! Imagine the > physical read sectors of your disk looking like > > > > but when you make your partitions, somehow you partitioned it > > > > This is possible because the drive allows addressing by 512K chunks. > So for some reason one of your partitions starts halfway inside a > physical sector. What is the problem with this? Now suppose your OS > sends data to be written to the block. If it were completely > aligned, the drive will just go kink-move the head to the block, and > overwrite it with this information. But since half of the block is > over the phsical sector, and half over , what the disk now > needs to do is to > > pass 1) read > pass 2) modify the second half of to match the first half of > pass 3) write > pass 4) read > pass 5) modify the first half of to match the second half of > pass 6) write > > Or what is known as a read-modify-write operation. Thus the disk > becomes a lot less efficient. > > -- > > Now, I don't know if this is the actual problem is causing your > performance problems. But this may be it. When you use fdisk, it > defaults to aligning the partition to cylinder boundaries, and use the > default (from ancient times) value of 63 x (512B sized) sectors per > track. Since 63 is not evenly divisible by 8, you see that quite > likely some of your partitions are not aligned to the physical sector > boundaries. > > If you use cfdisk, you can try to change the geometry wit
Re: [gentoo-user] When is a disk not a disk?
On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 4:27 PM, Peter Humphrey wrote: > Hello again List, > > $ sudo fdisk -l > > Unable to seek on /dev/sda > > What am I to make of this? The system runs ok, but apparently the > underlying disk subsystem isn't happy. This box has only the one disk at > the moment. Google doesn't help. > > The box is a new Armari system with an Asus P7P55D motherboard and a > Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB SATA II hdd. > > -- > Rgds > Peter. > > Very strange. What's in dmesg when the machine boots? Is it possible an older driver got loaded and it's showing up as hda instead of sda? I found that on one of my machines recently. - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] When is a disk not a disk?
On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 4:46 PM, Mark Knecht wrote: > On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 4:27 PM, Peter Humphrey > wrote: >> Hello again List, >> >> $ sudo fdisk -l >> >> Unable to seek on /dev/sda >> >> What am I to make of this? The system runs ok, but apparently the >> underlying disk subsystem isn't happy. This box has only the one disk at >> the moment. Google doesn't help. >> >> The box is a new Armari system with an Asus P7P55D motherboard and a >> Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB SATA II hdd. >> >> -- >> Rgds >> Peter. >> >> > Very strange. > > What's in dmesg when the machine boots? Is it possible an older driver > got loaded and it's showing up as hda instead of sda? I found that on > one of my machines recently. > > - Mark > sorry to have forgotten is but simply do df and see what it says is mounted
Re: [gentoo-user] When is a disk not a disk?
On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 6:16 PM, Peter Humphrey wrote: > On Monday 08 February 2010 01:27:33 Mark Knecht wrote: > >> sorry to have forgotten is but simply do >> >> df >> >> and see what it says is mounted > > $ df > Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on > rootfs 60G 25G 32G 44% / > /dev/root 60G 25G 32G 44% / > rc-svcdir 1.0M 108K 916K 11% /lib64/rc/init.d > udev 10M 144K 9.9M 2% /dev > shm 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /dev/shm > /dev/sda6 40G 6.4G 32G 17% /home > /dev/sda7 61G 23G 36G 39% /home/prh/common > tmpfs 9.0G 1.8M 9.0G 1% /tmp > > Now, ever since I upgraded to openrc (by setting ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=~amd64 > when I installed this system) my root partition has not been shown as a > physical partition. I decided to let it go for the time being. > > -- > Rgds > Peter. > > Is this some sort of LVM thing creeping in? I don't use it but I see signs of it starting to show up on my systems like something is making it come in with new profiles or something. I don't know how LVM works but I assume that rootfs and /dev/root have something to do with your main file system? I rebuilt new hardware for my dad yesterday using the default sda1/2/3 setup from the Gentoo AMD64 Install Guide and I see the following: gandalf ~ # df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/sda3103212320 5041116 92928324 6% / udev 10240 164 10076 2% /dev shm1925772 0 1925772 0% /dev/shm gandalf ~ # cat /proc/partitions major minor #blocks name 80 976762584 sda 81 102343 sda1 828388608 sda2 83 104857600 sda3 gandalf ~ # Did you intend to have 3 100MB partitions at the start of your drive and then everything else inside of an extended partition? It's not wrong - it was just unexpected for me. Is yours a 1-Terabyte drive? [QUOTE] $cat /proc/partitions major minor #blocks name 80 976762584 sda 81 112423 sda1 82 112455 sda2 83 104422 sda3 84 1 sda4 85 62918509 sda5 86 41945683 sda6 87 64685691 sda7 88 2925 sda8 89 1431 sda9 8 10 10490413 sda10 8 11 10482381 sda11 8 12 20980858 sda12 8 13 10490413 sda13 [/QUOTE]
Re: [gentoo-user] 1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? -> bar performance so far
On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 6:08 PM, Willie Wong wrote: > On Sun, Feb 07, 2010 at 01:42:18PM -0800, Mark Knecht wrote: >> OK - it turns out if I start fdisk using the -u option it show me >> sector numbers. Looking at the original partition put on just using >> default values it had the starting sector was 63 - probably about the >> worst value it could be. As a test I blew away that partition and >> created a new one starting at 64 instead and the untar results are >> vastly improved - down to roughly 20 seconds from 8-10 minutes. That's >> roughly twice as fast as the old 120GB SATA2 drive I was using to test >> the system out while I debugged this issue. > > That's good to hear. > >> I'm still a little fuzzy about what happens to the extra sectors at >> the end of a track. Are they used and I pay for a little bit of >> overhead reading data off of them or are they ignored and I lose >> capacity? I think it must be the former as my partition isn't all that >> much less than 1TB. > > As far as I know, you shouldn't worry about it. The > head/track/cylinder addressing is a relic of an older day. Almost all > modern drives should be accessed via LBA. If interested, take a look > at the wikipedia entry on Cylinder-Head-Sector and Logical Block > Addressing. > > Basically, you are not losing anything. > > Cheers, > > W > -- > Willie W. Wong ww...@math.princeton.edu > Data aequatione quotcunque fluentes quantitae involvente fluxiones invenire > et vice versa ~~~ I. Newton > > Hi, Yeah, a little more study and thinking confirms this. The sectors are 4K. WD put them on there. The sectors are 4K. Just because there might be extra physical space at the end of a track doesn't mean I can ever use it. The sectors are 4K and WD put them on there and they've taken ALL that into account already. They are 4K physically with ECC but accessible by CHS and by LBA in 512B chunks. The trick for speed at the OS/driver level is to make sure we are always grabbing 4K logical blocks from a single 4K physical sector off the drive. If we do it's fast. If we don't and start asking for a 4K block that isn't in a single 4K physical block then it becomes very slow as the drive hardware/firmware/processor has to do multiple reads and piece it together for us which is slow. (VERY slow...) By using partitions mapped to sector number values divisible by 8 we do this. (8 * 512B = 4K) The extra space at the end of a track/cylinder is 'lost' but it was lost before we bought the drive because the sectors are 4K so there is nothing 'lost' by the choices we make in fdisk. I must remember to use fdisk -u to see the sector numbers when making the partitions and remember to do some test writes to the partition to ensure it's right and the speed is good before doing any real work. This has been helpful for me. I'm glad Valmor is getting better results also. I wish I had checked the title before I sent the original email it was supposed to be 1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? -> bad performance so far Maybe sticking that here will help others when they Google for this later. Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Problem compiling freemind
On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 3:57 PM, Peter Humphrey wrote: > On Sunday 07 February 2010 18:12:58 Mark Knecht wrote: > >> What do you see with java-config -l ? > > $ java-config -L > The following VMs are available for generation-2: > *) IcedTea6-bin 1.7 [icedtea6-bin] > 2) Sun JDK 1.5.0.22 [sun-jdk-1.5] > > -- > Rgds > Peter. > > I actually meant to try the lower case L. Mine shows some ant stuff which I think you were having trouble with, at least in the compile messages? - Mark m...@firefly ~/Desktop $ java-config -l [cyrus-sasl-2] The Cyrus SASL (Simple Authentication and Security Layer). (/usr/share/cyrus-sasl-2/package.env) [antlr] A parser generator for C++, C#, Java, and Python (/usr/share/antlr/package.env) [gjdoc] A javadoc compatible Java source documentation generator. (/usr/share/gjdoc/package.env) [xulrunner-1.9] Mozilla runtime package that can be used to bootstrap XUL+XPCOM applications (/usr/share/xulrunner-1.9/package.env) [pdflib-5] A library for generating PDF on the fly. (/usr/share/pdflib-5/package.env) [subversion] Advanced version control system (/usr/share/subversion/package.env) [pilot-link] suite of tools for moving data between a Palm device and a desktop (/usr/share/pilot-link/package.env) [db-4.7] Oracle Berkeley DB (/usr/share/db-4.7/package.env) [libidn] Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) implementation (/usr/share/libidn/package.env) m...@firefly ~/Desktop $
Re: [gentoo-user] How the HAL are you supposed to use these files?
On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 2:20 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote: > Hi, Gentoo! > > I've just got a sparkling new installation of Gentoo on my new PC. It > only took me ~5 hours, mainly because I'd already configured the kernel > in a trial run. :-) > > However, I'm now trying to get X up and running. "The X Server > Configuration HOWTO", section 3. "Configuring Xorg" says: > > "Hal comes with many premade device rules, also called policies. > These policy files are available in /usr/../policy. Just find a > few that suit your needs most closely and copy them to /etc/" > > "For example, to get a basic working keyboard/mouse combination, you > could copy the following files... > /usr/.../10-input-policy.fdi > /usr/.../10-x11-input.fdi" > > . Am I the only person that finds this semantic gibberish? Is there > any explanation somewhere of what a "policy" aka "device rule" is? What > is the semantic significance of a "device rule"? What does it mean, to > "rule a device", or what sort of restrictions are being placed on this > device? > > Given that one might desire a "basic working keyboard/mouse > combination", what is the chain of reasoning that ends up selecting the > file called "10-input-policy.fdi" from all the other ones? > > This file is an inpenetrable stanza of uncommented XML. Are its verbs > documented somewhere? What do "" and "" mean, > for example? > > Can this new-style fragmented XML configuration do anything that a good > old-fashioned, human-readable and compact xorg.conf can't? If so, what? > What am I missing here? > > Please, somebody, tell me all this HAL stuff is straightforwardly > explained in an easily accessible Gentoo document, so that I can hang my > head in shame and apologise for the noise! ;-) > > -- > Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany). > > You are not the only person who finds that decipherable. I don't understand it and actually I don't even use them unless they are already where they need to be. hald runs default in rc-update and things just work. I've done two new AMD64 installations this week and things seem to be working fine so far. I'm using evdev in make.config for X mouse and keyboard. HTH, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] How the HAL are you supposed to use these files?
On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 3:41 PM, Paul Hartman wrote: > On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 4:20 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote: >> Please, somebody, tell me all this HAL stuff is straightforwardly >> explained in an easily accessible Gentoo document, so that I can hang my >> head in shame and apologise for the noise! ;-) > > I believe you'll be hearing from Dale in the near future. :) > > HAL-in-xorg-in-a-nutshell: If you're using an ordinary desktop system, > you shouldn't need to manually do anything. Just run X as usual and it > should work. While I think this is what people believe, I must point out that for it work automatically the system needs to be supported by whatever version of drivers support the graphics device in the system. I just got a DH55HC motherboard with the i5-661 processor which does some or most of the VGA function. For that device to be discovered and run automatically I would have had to use stuff that's marked ~amd64 which I generally don't do and in this case didn't because it became a waterfall of things getting unmasked. So, if you're supported it will work. If you're not because this is new hardware then you still need xorg.conf. Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] 1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? -> bar performance so far
On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 4:05 PM, Frank Steinmetzger wrote: > Am Sonntag, 7. Februar 2010 schrieb Mark Knecht: > >> Hi Willie, >> OK - it turns out if I start fdisk using the -u option it show me >> sector numbers. Looking at the original partition put on just using >> default values it had the starting sector was 63 > > Same here. > >> - probably about the worst value it could be. > > Hm what about those first 62 sectors? > I bought this 500GB drive for my laptop recently and did a fresh partitioning > scheme on it, and then rsynced the filesystems of the old, smaller drive onto > it. The first two partitions are ntfs, but I believe they also use cluster > sizes of 4k by default. So technically I could repartition everything and > then restore the contents from my backup drive. > > And indeed my system becomes very sluggish when I do some HDD shuffling. > >> As a test I blew away that partition and >> created a new one starting at 64 instead and the untar results are >> vastly improved - down to roughly 20 seconds from 8-10 minutes. That's >> roughly twice as fast as the old 120GB SATA2 drive I was using to test >> the system out while I debugged this issue. > > Though the result justifies your decision, I would have though one has to > start at 65, unless the disk starts counting its sectors at 0. > -- > Gruß | Greetings | Qapla' > Programmers don’t die, they GOSUB without RETURN. > Good question. I don't know where it starts counting but 63 seems to be the first one you can use on any blank drive I've looked at so far. There's a few small downsides I've run into with all of this so far: 1) Since we don't use sector 63 it seems that fdisk will still tell you that you can use 63 until you use up all your primary partitions. It used to be easier to put additional partitions on when it gave you the next sector you could use after the one you just added.. Now I'm finding that I need to write things down and figure it out more carefully outside of fdisk. 2) When I do something like +60G fdisk chooses the final sector, but it seems that it doesn't end 1 sector before something divisible by 8, so again, once the new partition is in I need to do more calculations to find where then next one will go. Probably better to decide what you want for an end and make sure that the next sector is divisible by 8. 3) When I put in an extended partition I put the start of it at something divisible by 8. When I went to add a logical partition inside of that I found that there was some strange number of sectors dedicated to the extended partition itself and I had to waste a few more sectors getting the logical partitions divisible by 8. 4) Everything I've done so far leave me with messages about partition 1 not ending on a cylinder boundary. Googling on that one says don't worry about it. I don't know... So, it works - the new partitions are fast but it's a bit of work getting them in place. - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Problem compiling freemind
On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 4:50 PM, Peter Humphrey wrote:
> On Monday 08 February 2010 19:36:49 Mark Knecht wrote:
>
>> I actually meant to try the lower case L. Mine shows some ant stuff
>> which I think you were having trouble with, at least in the compile
>> messages?
>
> Hmm. That gave me the clue; yes, freemind was throwing an ant error
> during compilation (but that didn't prevent emerge from reporting
> success), so I recompiled all the ant* packages on the system and that's
> fixed it.
>
> Problem now is that I asked for ant-core, ant-nodeps, ant-trax and antlr
> to be remerged, but I saw this:
>
> $ eix -I ant
> ...
> [U] dev-java/antlr (2@22/01/10 -> 2.7.7{tbz2} 3.1.3-r2(3)): A parser
> generator for C++, C#, Java, and Python
> ...
>
> That's a puzzle, because I'd only just run an emerge --sync and -uaDv
> world, so why was antlr not upgraded then?
>
> The upgrade of antlr pulled in a new package, stringtemplate.
>
> Whatever was wrong, reinstalling those four packages solved my problem.
> Thanks for the hint, Mark.
>
> --
> Rgds
> Peter.
Great news that it works. The rest of it is probably just one of those
mysteries that account for the rich tapestry of life.
Have fun,
Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] How the HAL are you supposed to use these files?
On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 5:33 AM, Neil Bothwick wrote: > On Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:43:12 +0100, Zeerak Waseem wrote: > >> > That's as much crippling as simplifying. You can do without pam and >> > hal by setting appropriate USE flags (I run pam-free here by >> > doing just that) but D-Bus provides a standard way for applications to >> > communicate with one another and removing it can stop your desktop >> > working as it should. > >> Really? I removed dbus from my system altogether and everything seems >> to be communicating fine. And according to this >> (http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-810848-postdays-0-postorder-asc-start-0.html) >> a system should be able to communicate without dbus. > > I've not read the whole thread, but this quote jumped out. > > "DBUS is just the chosen successor to DCOP and CORBA; all platforms have > inter-process messaging (e.g, Distributed Objects in OSX/*STEP)." > > It is a messaging layer and nothing to do with HAL, although HAL may use > it to communicate, for example to let the desktop know that a USB device > has been connected or disconnected. > > While HAL is an ugly mess that should never be exposed to users, D-Bus > just gets on with its job, maybe because it is not exposed to users. > > > -- > Neil Bothwick The forums seems to be down at the moment so I'll try to read the thread later. The only thing I wanted to say what that for me it's been somewhat backward. hald doesn't work for my video cards because my hardware isn't well supported. However I still have it turned on. I cannot suggest why it's on, but it is. I presume it helps with mounting external drives and things but I cannot or have not proved it. On the other hand there's a _long_ history in the pro-audio area of seeing problems with dbus messing up the operation of Jack audio and many of us including me leave dbus turned off. Go figure! - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] 1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? -> bar performance so far
On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 4:37 PM, Mark Knecht wrote: > > There's a few small downsides I've run into with all of this so far: > > 1) Since we don't use sector 63 it seems that fdisk will still tell > you that you can use 63 until you use up all your primary partitions. > It used to be easier to put additional partitions on when it gave you > the next sector you could use after the one you just added.. Now I'm > finding that I need to write things down and figure it out more > carefully outside of fdisk. > Replying mostly to myself, WRT the value 63 continuing to show up after making the first partition start at 64, in my case since for desktop machines the first partition is general /boot, and as it's written and read so seldom, in the future when faced with this problem I will likely start /boot at 63 and just ensure that all the other partitions - /, /var, /home, etc., start on boundaries divisible by 8. It will make using fdisk slightly more pleasant. - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] 1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? -> bar performance so far
On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 9:09 AM, Frank Steinmetzger wrote: > So sdb7 now ends at sector 976703935. Interestingly, I couldn’t use the > immediate next sector for sdb8: > start for sdb8 response by fdisk > 976703936 sector already allocated > 976703944 Value out of range. First sector... (default 976703999): > > The first one fdisk offered me was exactly 64 sectors behind the end sector of > sdb7 (976703999), which would leave a space of those mysterious 62 “empty” > sectors in between. So I used 976704000, which is divisable by 64 again, > though it’s not that relevant for a partition of 31 MB. :D Again, this is probably unrelated to anything going on in this thread but I started wondering this morning if maybe fdisk could take a step forward with these newer disk technologies and build in some smarts about where to put partition boundaries. I.e. - if I'm using a 4K block size disk why not have fdisk do things better? My first thought was to look at the man page for fdisk and see who the author was. I did not find any email addresses. However I did find some very interesting comments about partitioning disks in the bugs section, quoted below. I don't think I need what the 'bugs' author perceives as the advantages of fdisk so I think I'll try to focus a bit more on cfdisk. Interestingly cfdisk was the tool Willie pointed out when he kindly took the time to educate me on what was going on physically. - Mark [QUOTE] BUGS There are several *fdisk programs around. Each has its problems and strengths. Try them in the order cfdisk, fdisk, sfdisk. (Indeed, cfdisk is a beautiful program that has strict requirements on the partition tables it accepts, and produces high quality partition tables. Use it if you can. fdisk is a buggy program that does fuzzy things - usually it happens to produce reasonable results. Its single advantage is that it has some support for BSD disk labels and other non-DOS partition tables. Avoid it if you can. sfdisk is for hackers only - the user interface is terrible, but it is more correct than fdisk and more powerful than both fdisk and cfdisk. Moreover, it can be used noninteractively.) [/QUOTE]
Re: [gentoo-user] 1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? -> bar performance so far
On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 9:38 AM, Stroller wrote: > IMO this is a fdisk "bug". A feature should be added so that it tries to > align optimally in most circumstances. RAID controllers should not be trying > to do anything clever to accommodate potential misalignment unless it is > really cheap to do so. > > Stroller. We think alike. I personally wouldn't call it a bug because drives with 4K physical sectors are very new, but adding a feature to align things better is dead on the right thing to do. It's silly to expect every Linux user installing binary distros to have to learn this stuff to get good performance. - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] emerge -avt xfce4-meta; haven't got startxfce4. Help, please!
On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 10:00 AM, Alan Mackenzie wrote: > Hi, Gentoo, > > The Subject: just about says it all; following the instructions in "The > Xfce Configuration Guide", I did > > # emerge -avt xfce4-meta > > followed by > > $ echo "exec startxfce4" > ~/.xinitrc > > followed by > > $ startx. > > The X-server complained about not finding startxfce4. A quick find > command, "find / -name startxfce4" (and I do mean quick - it took only > half a second :-) demonstrated a complete absence of a file with that > name. > > Help, please! What do I need to do to get xfce running? > > -- > Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany). > > Hummthat worked for me: firefly ~ # which startxfce4 /usr/bin/startxfce4 firefly ~ # equery belongs /usr/bin/startxfce4 [ Searching for file(s) /usr/bin/startxfce4 in *... ] xfce-base/xfce-utils-4.6.1 (/usr/bin/startxfce4) firefly ~ # m...@firefly ~ $ cat .xinitrc exec startxfce4 m...@firefly ~ $ Do and emerge -pvDuN @world/revdep-rebuild -ip and make sure you are really clean. It should work but the info above should allow oyu to get it running. I didn't need to do anything special here. Hope this helps, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] emerge -avt xfce4-meta; haven't got startxfce4. Help, please!
firefly ~ # emerge -ep xfce4-meta | grep xfce | grep utils [ebuild R ] xfce-base/xfce-utils-4.6.1 firefly ~ # On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 10:36 AM, Mark Knecht wrote: > firefly ~ # which startxfce4 > /usr/bin/startxfce4 > firefly ~ # equery belongs /usr/bin/startxfce4 > [ Searching for file(s) /usr/bin/startxfce4 in *... ] > xfce-base/xfce-utils-4.6.1 (/usr/bin/startxfce4) > firefly ~ # > > m...@firefly ~ $ cat .xinitrc > exec startxfce4 > m...@firefly ~ $ Possibly you installed something other than xfce4-meta? firefly ~ # emerge -ep xfce4-meta | grep xfce | grep utils [ebuild R ] xfce-base/xfce-utils-4.6.1 firefly ~ #
Re: [gentoo-user] 1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? -> bar performance so far
On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 1:13 PM, Frank Steinmetzger wrote: > Am Dienstag, 9. Februar 2010 schrieb Frank Steinmetzger: > >> I have reset sdb7 to use boundaries divisible by 64. >> Old range begin%64 size%64 New range begin%64 >> size%64 813113973-976703804 0.8281 0.125 813113984-976703935 0 >> 0 >> >> And guess what - the speed of truecrypt at creating a new container >> doubled. With the old scheme, it started at 13.5 MB/s, now it started at >> 26-odd. I’m blaming that cap on the USB connection to the drive, though >> it’s gradually getting more: after 2/3 of the partition, it’s at 27.7. > > I fear I'll have to correct that a little. This 13.5 figure seems to be > incorrect, in another try it was also shown at the beginning, but then > quickly got up to >20. Also, a buddy just told me that this 4k stuff applies > only to most recent drives, as old as 5 months or so. > > When I use parted on the drives, it says (both the old external and my 2 > months old internal): > Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B > So no speedup for me then. :-/ Frank, As best I can tell so far none of the Linux tools will tell you that the sectors are 4K. I had to go to the WD web site and find the actual drive specs to discover that was true. As far as I know so far there isn't a big improvement to be had when the sector size is 512B. - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] 1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? -> bar performance so far
On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 4:31 PM, Iain Buchanan wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-02-09 at 14:54 -0800, Mark Knecht wrote:
>> On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 1:13 PM, Frank Steinmetzger wrote:
>
>
>> > When I use parted on the drives, it says (both the old external and my 2
>> > months old internal):
>> > Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
>> > So no speedup for me then. :-/
>
> so does mine :)
>
>> Frank,
>> As best I can tell so far none of the Linux tools will tell you
>> that the sectors are 4K. I had to go to the WD web site and find the
>> actual drive specs to discover that was true.
>
> however if you use dmesg:
> $ dmesg | grep ata
> ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 irq_stat 0x00400040, connection status changed
> irq 17
> ata2: DUMMY
> ata3: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m2...@0xf6ffb800 port 0xf6ffba00 irq 17
> ioatdma: Intel(R) QuickData Technology Driver 4.00
> ata3: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
> ata1: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
> ata1.00: ATA-7: ST9160823ASG, 3.ADD, max UDMA/133
> ata1.00: 312581808 sectors, multi 8: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32)
> ...
>
> you can look up your drive model number (in my case ST9160823ASG) and
> find out the details. (That's a Seagate Momentus 160Gb with actual 512
> byte sectors).
>
> saves having to open up your laptop / pc if you didn't order the drive
> separately or you've forgotten.
> --
> Iain Buchanan
>
> polygon:
> Dead parrot.
>
>
>
Consider as an alternative "hdparm dash capital eye". Note that is the
1TB drive and it still suggests 512B Logical/Physical sector size so
I'd still have to go find out for sure but there's lots of easily
readable info there to make it reasonably easy.
- Mark
gandalf ~ # hdparm -I /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
ATA device, with non-removable media
Model Number: WDC WD10EARS-00Y5B1
Serial Number: WD-WCAV55464493
Firmware Revision: 80.00A80
Transport: Serial, SATA 1.0a, SATA II Extensions, SATA Rev
2.5, SATA Rev 2.6
Standards:
Supported: 8 7 6 5
Likely used: 8
Configuration:
Logical max current
cylinders 16383 16383
heads 16 16
sectors/track 63 63
--
CHS current addressable sectors: 16514064
LBAuser addressable sectors: 268435455
LBA48 user addressable sectors: 1953525168
Logical/Physical Sector size: 512 bytes
device size with M = 1024*1024: 953869 MBytes
device size with M = 1000*1000: 1000204 MBytes (1000 GB)
cache/buffer size = unknown
Capabilities:
LBA, IORDY(can be disabled)
Queue depth: 32
Standby timer values: spec'd by Standard, with device specific minimum
R/W multiple sector transfer: Max = 16 Current = 16
Recommended acoustic management value: 128, current value: 128
DMA: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5 *udma6
Cycle time: min=120ns recommended=120ns
PIO: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
Cycle time: no flow control=120ns IORDY flow control=120ns
Commands/features:
Enabled Supported:
*SMART feature set
Security Mode feature set
*Power Management feature set
*Write cache
*Look-ahead
*Host Protected Area feature set
*WRITE_BUFFER command
*READ_BUFFER command
*NOP cmd
*DOWNLOAD_MICROCODE
Power-Up In Standby feature set
*SET_FEATURES required to spinup after power up
SET_MAX security extension
*Automatic Acoustic Management feature set
*48-bit Address feature set
*Device Configuration Overlay feature set
*Mandatory FLUSH_CACHE
*FLUSH_CACHE_EXT
*SMART error logging
*SMART self-test
*General Purpose Logging feature set
*64-bit World wide name
*{READ,WRITE}_DMA_EXT_GPL commands
*Segmented DOWNLOAD_MICROCODE
*Gen1 signaling speed (1.5Gb/s)
*Gen2 signaling speed (3.0Gb/s)
*Native Command Queueing (NCQ)
*Host-initiated interface power management
*Phy event counters
*NCQ priority information
*DMA Setup Auto-Activate optimization
*Software settings preservation
*SMART Command Transport (SCT) feature set
*SCT Features Control (AC4)
*SCT Data Tables (AC5)
unknown 206[12] (vendor specific)
unknown 206[13] (vendor specific)
Security:
Re: [gentoo-user] emerge -avt xfce4-meta; haven't got startxfce4. Help, please!
On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 3:22 AM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 09, 2010 at 02:39:14PM -0500, dhk wrote:
>
>> Do you have xfce-base/xfdesktop installed? Try installing it.
>
> No, as it happens, I didn't. When I tried
>
> # emerge xfdesktop
>
> , the compiler threw a segfault. It does this reproducibly. Bother!
>
> I don't have any fancy C\(XX\)?FLAGS set, and am using a standard
> athlon-64 setup.
>
> Presumably, rebuilding the compiler isn't going to help much, since the
> athlon-64 stage-3 would have had the latest and greatest compiler anyhow.
>
> I think, at this stage, I'll just try emerging a different window
> manager. Maybe blackbox.
Is it just me? On a new install I always still to an emerge -e @world
once I get to a working text based boot and I've done any modification
to make.conf as I don't really know how the compiler or tool set was
built. Just paranoid.
I used to do it twice before I started installing apps or desktops but
I've cut back. :-)
If you care to compare:
m...@firefly ~ $ cat /etc/make.conf
# Please consult /usr/share/portage/config/make.conf.example for a more
# detailed example.
CFLAGS="-O2 -march=native -pipe"
#Safe CFlags for the Core-i7, saved for reference
#CFLAGS="-march=core2 -msse4 -mcx16 -msahf -O2 -pipe"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"
# WARNING: Changing your CHOST is not something that should be done lightly.
# Please consult http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/change-chost.xml before changing.
CHOST="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu"
# These are the USE flags that were used in addition to what is provided by the
# profile used for building.
#USE="hal"
USE="aac alsa cairo caps cdda cddb cdparanoia cdr dts dvd dvdr ffmpeg
flac fltk ftp gnome hal ieee1394 jack kde lame java jpeg ladspa lame
lash libsamplerate mmx mp3 mp4 mpeg musepack nsplugin ogg sse sse2
ssse3 sse4 tifftruetype vorbis xine xv xvid vmware -bluetooth -esound
-timidity"
MAKEOPTS="-j5"
GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://gentoo.osuosl.org/ "
SYNC="rsync://rsync.namerica.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage"
EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="--with-bdeps y"
#INPUT_DEVICES="keyboard mouse"
INPUT_DEVICES="evdev virtualbox"
VIDEO_CARDS="intel fbdev virtualbox vmware"
#VIDEO_CARDS="intel vesa fbdev"
ALSA_CARDS="hdsp usb"
LINGUAS="en"
ACCEPT_LICENSE="dlj-1.1 PUEL"
source /usr/local/portage/layman/make.conf
m...@firefly ~
Re: [gentoo-user] emerge -avt xfce4-meta; haven't got startxfce4. Help, please!
On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 7:42 AM, Alan McKinnon wrote: > On Wednesday 10 February 2010 17:33:46 Mark Knecht wrote: >> >> Is it just me? On a new install I always still to an emerge -e @world >> once I get to a working text based boot and I've done any modification >> to make.conf as I don't really know how the compiler or tool set was >> built. Just paranoid. > > That's worthwhile, it goes real quick once gcc and glibc are built. Plus > (until recently at least) the published stages always had an out of date gcc > on them. > >> I used to do it twice before I started installing apps or desktops but >> I've cut back. :-) > > Twice is pointless :-) > > gcc rebuilds itself twice to ensure that the binary is built with the same > version as the result, and verifies that the last two are bit-wise identical. > Then building the toolchain, then building the rest of world gives you exactly > what you hope to get from doing it twice. > And it was you or Neil or someone else here who pointed that out maybe 1-2 years ago so I stopped doing it twice. But, heck, why not? I do a lot of pointless things every day. I only do new installs a few times a year... ;-) Anyway, right after the system first comes up it's usually less than 1 hour to do a complete rebuild of that most basic system and I've had very few _strange_ problems bringing up Gentoo since I started doing it. (In 2000, so 10 years now...) - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Qt3 deprecated, but Qt4 still not x86 (only ~x86)???
On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 8:59 AM, Stroller
wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> Upgrading some packages today I saw:
>
> Qt3 is deprecated and unsupported, both upstream and by the Gentoo Qt
> Project. x11-libs/qt:3 will be removed from portage soon. See
> http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_f988855f798764822704bbbd743ab6f7.xml
> You are encouraged to use Qt4 instead.
>
> However when I try to resolve this, I find that only 3.3 versions are marked
> as stable:
>
> $ eix x11-libs/qt$
> [I] x11-libs/qt
> Available versions:
> (3) 3.3.8b-r1 3.3.8b-r2
> (4) [M]4.5.3 [M]~4.6.1
> {cups dbus debug doc examples firebird immqt immqt-bc ipv6 kde mysql
> nas nis odbc opengl postgres qt3support sqlite xinerama}
> Installed versions: 3.3.8b-r2(3)(14:05:56 10/02/10)(cups doc examples
> -debug -firebird -immqt -immqt-bc -ipv6 -mysql -nas -nis -odbc -opengl
> -postgres -sqlite -xinerama)
> Homepage: http://qt.nokia.com/
> Description: The Qt toolkit is a comprehensive C++ application
> development framework
>
> $
>
>
> Is anyone else seeing this, please?
>
> The message posted to Gentoo-dev suggests that Qt3 is going away right about
> NOW, but this doesn't seem to add up to what I'm seeing.
>
> Thanks in advance for any comments,
>
> Stroller.
>
>
>
I seem to have them both installed with only my old version of MYthTV
requiring qt-3.3.8
- Mark
firefly distfiles # eix -Ic qt
[I] dev-python/PyQt4 (4@02/03/10): A set of Python bindings for
the Qt toolkit
[I] virtual/poppler-qt4 (0.12.3...@02/04/10): Virtual package,
includes packages that contain libpoppler-qt4.so
[I] x11-libs/qt (3.3.8b-r2(3)@01/30/10): The Qt toolkit is a
comprehensive C++ application development framework
[I] x11-libs/qt-core (4.5.3-r2(4)@01/31/10): The Qt toolkit is a
comprehensive C++ application development framework
[I] x11-libs/qt-dbus (4.5.3-r1(4)@01/31/10): The DBus module for the Qt toolkit
[I] x11-libs/qt-gui (4.5.3-r2(4)@01/31/10): The GUI module for the Qt toolkit
[I] x11-libs/qt-opengl (4.5.3-r1(4)@02/03/10): The OpenGL module for
the Qt toolkit
[I] x11-libs/qt-qt3support (4.5.3(4)@02/02/10): The Qt3 support module
for the Qt toolkit
[I] x11-libs/qt-script (4.5.3-r1(4)@01/31/10): The ECMAScript module
for the Qt toolkit
[I] x11-libs/qt-sql (4.5.3(4)@01/31/10): The SQL module for the Qt toolkit
[I] x11-libs/qt-svg (4.5.3-r1(4)@02/03/10): The SVG module for the Qt toolkit
[I] x11-libs/qt-test (4.5.3-r1(4)@02/03/10): The testing framework
module for the Qt toolkit
[I] x11-libs/qt-webkit (4.5.3(4)@02/03/10): The Webkit module for the Qt toolkit
Found 13 matches.
firefly distfiles # equery depends =x11-libs/qt-3.3.8b-r2
[ Searching for packages depending on =x11-libs/qt-3.3.8b-r2... ]
media-tv/mythtv-0.21_p20877 (>=x11-libs/qt-3.3:3[mysql,opengl])
x11-themes/mythtv-themes-0.21_p16505 (>=x11-libs/qt-3.3:3)
firefly distfiles #
Re: [gentoo-user] Qt3 deprecated, but Qt4 still not x86 (only ~x86)???
On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 9:33 AM, Neil Bothwick wrote: > On Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:59:16 +, Stroller wrote: > >> The message posted to Gentoo-dev suggests that Qt3 is going away right >> about NOW, but this doesn't seem to add up to what I'm seeing. > > The message says it will be masked on Feb 21st and removed on March 21st. > So you have eleven days to add it to package.unmask and nearly six weeks > before you need to add the kde-sunset overlay. That's assuming the ebuilds > that depend on QT3 haven't been updated to wiork with QT4, which is > highly likely as that would require upstream changes for most of them too. > > It's a minor inconvenience, but they are giving us a decent warning. > > > -- > Neil Bothwick So am I at any great risk doing an emerge -C qt-3.3 and then expecting revdep-rebuild to fix up mythtv-0.21 with qt-4 using whatever it has ffor qt3-support? I'm __really__ not ready to upgrade my whole MythTV setup 0.22 if 0.21 requires qt-3 and the qt3 support stuff in qt4 doesn't work. That would be very painful for me even given 6 weeks. - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Qt3 deprecated, but Qt4 still not x86 (only ~x86)???
On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 10:46 AM, Neil Bothwick wrote: > On Wed, 10 Feb 2010 09:30:19 -0800, Mark Knecht wrote: > >> I seem to have them both installed with only my old version of MYthTV >> requiring qt-3.3.8 > > That's easy then, switch to MythTV 0.22, it's much better :) > > > -- > Neil Bothwick I don't care at all that it's much better. I care that what I have works and the family doesn't bother me. My Myth server is PowerPC based and so everytime I switch there's always things to relearn in terms of updating kernel and risks that others don't have. And I cannot update mythfrontend on my desktop machine without updating EVERY machine on the network to 0.22, so that's 2 desktops, 2 dedicated machines hooked to TVs and the server. That's a lot of work just because someone decides they don't want to support it anymore. On the other hand, if the qt4 qt3-support works then I don't update from 0.21 at all. Again, I cannot see the 0.22 gives me anything I care about but there's no way to know until I commit to making the change. Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Qt3 deprecated, but Qt4 still not x86 (only ~x86)???
On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 11:40 AM, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: >> >> Again, I cannot see the 0.22 gives me anything I care about but >> there's no way to know until I commit to making the change. >> >> Cheers, >> Mark > > if everything works, why are you even bothering with updates? Why do you care > at all that qt3 is going away? > > but as I told you, the solution is quickpkg. > > And for quickly deploying packages: > buidpkg > BINHOST. > > have a look at man emerge, man make.conf Volker, Thanks. I've not used quickpkg before but it seems like a very good short term solution. If I understand correctly I'd do something more or less like this? 1) quickpkg =qt-3.3.8xxx This creates the binary package and stores it in /usr/portage/package. I've done this step and the package is there. 2) emerge -C =qt-3.3.8x to remove the original. Easy when I do it. 3) emerge -pvg =qt-3.3.8b-r2 to get it to use the quickpkg version This all seems to work but it complains a bit about PORTAGE_BINHOST not being set. As best I can tell that's only for using another machine to get the binary? Is that true? Is seems from these commands that it's finding the one I just made. Or is there a format for doing this and pointing at a local directory? firefly ~ # emerge -pvg =x11-libs/qt-3.3.8b-r2 These are the packages that would be merged, in order: Calculating dependencies !!! PORTAGE_BINHOST unset, but use is requested. ... done! [binary R ] x11-libs/qt-3.3.8b-r2 USE="cups ipv6 mysql opengl -debug -doc -examples (-firebird) -immqt -immqt-bc -nas -nis -odbc -postgres -sqlite -xinerama" Total: 1 package (1 reinstall, 1 binary), Size of downloads: 0 kB firefly ~ # emerge -pv =x11-libs/qt-3.3.8b-r2 These are the packages that would be merged, in order: Calculating dependencies... done! [ebuild R ] x11-libs/qt-3.3.8b-r2 USE="cups ipv6 mysql opengl -debug -doc -examples (-firebird) -immqt -immqt-bc -nas -nis -odbc -postgres -sqlite -xinerama" 0 kB Total: 1 package (1 reinstall), Size of downloads: 0 kB firefly ~ # Thanks, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Qt3 deprecated, but Qt4 still not x86 (only ~x86)???
On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 4:03 PM, Mark Knecht wrote: > firefly ~ # emerge -pvg =x11-libs/qt-3.3.8b-r2 Ah, instead I should use emerge --usepkg =x11-libs/qt-3.3.8b-r2 No errors or warnings. Nice! Now Myth works no matter what happens in portage to qt... Thanks, Mark
[gentoo-user] Upside/downside to including config files in quickpkg?
Can someone comment on why I do or do not want to include config files when making quickpkg files? Seems like there is the issue of hand edits being saved which would be a good reason to keep them. I'm not overly worried about someone stealing them and getting access to settings, but I can see that might be a good reason not to. If I don't save them and then after a crash want to use binary packages to get a machine running quickly it seems like I'd want to include everything I could. What would the more experienced user do for the single-user desktop type user? Thanks, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Upside/downside to including config files in quickpkg?
On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 12:24 PM, Alan McKinnon wrote: > On Thursday 11 February 2010 22:09:28 Mark Knecht wrote: >> Can someone comment on why I do or do not want to include config files >> when making quickpkg files? >> >> Seems like there is the issue of hand edits being saved which would be >> a good reason to keep them. I'm not overly worried about someone >> stealing them and getting access to settings, but I can see that might >> be a good reason not to. >> >> If I don't save them and then after a crash want to use binary >> packages to get a machine running quickly it seems like I'd want to >> include everything I could. >> >> What would the more experienced user do for the single-user desktop type >> user? > > > The config of the package you quickpkg'ed likely works. > emerge -k is most often used to revert your own mistakes, so you want the > thing to work. Your latest configs are suspect, why insist they take priority? > You can always rename them to .bak if you think they might get nuked. > > Why do you care if someone steals your quickpkgs? Put them in a directory > owned by root, they are then as safe as your stuff in /etc. To get to the > tarballs, they must get to a place where they can just read the originals > Thanks Alan. That confirms what I was thinking. My comment about things getting stolen is that I might burn them to DVD for safe keeping in which case anyone can walk off with the DVD. I'm not overly worried about that and it's far and away less of an issue than getting the machine back to a running state. Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Upside/downside to including config files in quickpkg?
On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 12:49 PM, Alan McKinnon wrote: > On Thursday 11 February 2010 22:37:00 Mark Knecht wrote: >> On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 12:24 PM, Alan McKinnon > wrote: >> > On Thursday 11 February 2010 22:09:28 Mark Knecht wrote: >> >> Can someone comment on why I do or do not want to include config files >> >> when making quickpkg files? >> >> >> >> Seems like there is the issue of hand edits being saved which would be >> >> a good reason to keep them. I'm not overly worried about someone >> >> stealing them and getting access to settings, but I can see that might >> >> be a good reason not to. >> >> >> >> If I don't save them and then after a crash want to use binary >> >> packages to get a machine running quickly it seems like I'd want to >> >> include everything I could. >> >> >> >> What would the more experienced user do for the single-user desktop type >> >> user? >> > >> > The config of the package you quickpkg'ed likely works. >> > emerge -k is most often used to revert your own mistakes, so you want the >> > thing to work. Your latest configs are suspect, why insist they take >> > priority? You can always rename them to .bak if you think they >> > might get nuked. >> > >> > Why do you care if someone steals your quickpkgs? Put them in a directory >> > owned by root, they are then as safe as your stuff in /etc. To get to the >> > tarballs, they must get to a place where they can just read the >> > originals >> >> Thanks Alan. That confirms what I was thinking. >> >> My comment about things getting stolen is that I might burn them to >> DVD for safe keeping in which case anyone can walk off with the DVD. >> I'm not overly worried about that and it's far and away less of an >> issue than getting the machine back to a running state. > > OK, I see. > > As long as you know which configs have password in them and take precautions, > you should be OK. > > For the truly paranoid (and there will be someone who is validly so) another > option is to store /etc in a remote SVN instance that is secured, and not > store configs with the quickpkgs Thanks. Like I said originally I'm not worried about it but at least you understood why I asked. One thing I haven't found so far is what to put in make.conf to get the buildpkg feature to include the configs. It's easy at the command line. Where's the documentation on how to actually use this the right way automatically? - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Upside/downside to including config files in quickpkg?
On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Alan McKinnon wrote: > On Friday 12 February 2010 00:13:23 Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: >> > One thing I haven't found so far is what to put in make.conf to get >> > the buildpkg feature to include the configs. It's easy at the command >> > line. Where's the documentation on how to actually use this the right >> > way automatically? >> > >> > >> > >> > - Mark >> >> when you use buildpkg feature the packages contain the virgin unedited >> configs as they are installed by the package and not any edits done by >> you. > > Just checking something: > > We are all aware of the difference between > > emerge --buildpkg > > and > > quickpkg > > right/ > > -- > alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com Volker is. I am not sure I am and I'm not sure that Neil was talking about quickpkg which is what I am using so far. The command quickpkg --include-configs says it includes the configs. That's what I thought we (you and I Alan) were talking about. On the other hand I presumed (apparently incorrectly) that the FEATURES="buildpkg" (which is what I think Neil is speaking about) gave me the same option but I now guess it doesn't. If I need to use quickpkg to save the configs then I think I'll do that being that as I simple-minded home user with no admin experience I have no in-place rigorous methods for doing __any__ backups. I just tar up directories once in awhile and deal with the problems that come later. (If they come...when they come...they do come, don't they?) ;-) - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Upside/downside to including config files in quickpkg?
On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 4:29 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: > On Freitag 12 Februar 2010, Dale wrote: >> >> This is how I understand it. If you use buildpkg with emerge, you get >> the original configs from the source tarball. If you use quickpkg, then >> you get the config files YOU created. If I understand this correctly, >> you can remember it this way as well. Doing it during the emerge gives >> you what emerge produces. Doing it with quickpkg gives you what you >> produced. >> >> All that and I didn't confuse myself. So, I'm probably wrong in how I >> understand it. lol >> >> Dale >> >> :-) :-) > > no, this is entirely correct. > > >From what I've seen last night and today I do not think this is correct. quickpkg =NAME produces a binary package with NO config files included. You have to use quickpkg --include-configs =NAME to get the configs, at least from what I can see from the messages it produces when it runs. There is another option to limit the configs to only the unedited ones. - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] 1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? -> bar performance so far
On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 1:06 AM, Mick wrote: > On Tuesday 09 February 2010 16:31:15 Mark Knecht wrote: >> On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 4:37 PM, Mark Knecht wrote: >> >> >> > There's a few small downsides I've run into with all of this so far: >> > >> > 1) Since we don't use sector 63 it seems that fdisk will still tell >> > you that you can use 63 until you use up all your primary partitions. >> > It used to be easier to put additional partitions on when it gave you >> > the next sector you could use after the one you just added.. Now I'm >> > finding that I need to write things down and figure it out more >> > carefully outside of fdisk. >> >> Replying mostly to myself, WRT the value 63 continuing to show up >> after making the first partition start at 64, in my case since for >> desktop machines the first partition is general /boot, and as it's >> written and read so seldom, in the future when faced with this problem >> I will likely start /boot at 63 and just ensure that all the other >> partitions - /, /var, /home, etc., start on boundaries divisible by 8. >> >> It will make using fdisk slightly more pleasant. > > I noticed while working on two new laptops with gparted that resizing Windows > 7 and creating new partitions showed up small blank partitions (marked as > hidden) in between the resized, and/or the new partitions. If I recall > correctly these were only a few KB each so rather small as such. I am not > sure why gparted created these - could it be related to the drive > automatically aligning partitions to this 4K sector size that is discussed > here? > -- > Regards, > Mick > http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0902.3/01024.html Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] New Gentoo system has become unstable and unusable - help, please!
On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 12:54 AM, Alan Mackenzie wrote: > Hi, Gentoo, > > My new Gentoo box has become unusably unstable. > > The first sign was when the compiler threw a segfault whilst emerging > the xfce window manager. I "solved" this by emerging Openbox instead. > > Then I got another compiler segfault whilst emerging firefox (yes, I > know there's a binary for this). > > Then, on somebody's advice (not fully understood), I did > > # emerge -e gcc > > , to try and get a consistent working gcc. This crashed. I repeated > the invocation, and it crashed more quickly. :-( > > At this point, I thought, just reload "everything" from the stage3, with > > # cd / ; bunzip2 /stage3-amd64-20100121.tar.gz > > , which didn't help either. I emerged gentoolkit, to see if I could get > some handle on the mess. Then > > # revdep-rebuild -p > > threw a segfault. > > At this point, I'm feeling a bit sad. My rough guess is that there's > some conflict somewhere between 32-bit and 64-bit code, and some of my > USE flags are inconsistent with some others, or the kernel, or something > like that. > > One other thing I remember vaguely is that early on, some emerge told me > I had to "revdep-rebuild" something. I wasn't able to do this through > not yet knowing what "revdep-rebuild" meant, and not having any file of > that name on my system. Could this be the cause? > > Finally, is there a way of reloading/rebuilding ALL the executables > onto/on my system without discarding all my painfully wrought config > files and without portage getting confused? > > Thanks in advance for the help! > > -- > Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany). > > +1 for memtest86. Since it's new hardware possibly your CPU fan isn't well seated? Failures while compiling sound like heat to me. Failures at random times sound like heat, PSU and memory problems. Hope tis helps, Mark
[gentoo-user] poppler vs virtual/poppler & eix-test-obsolete
Hi, Mostly in support of (I think) KDE I have poppler installed which seems to cause eix-test-obsolete a little indigestion. It sees virtual/poppler as installed but says they are not in the database. Do I have a problem here (eix-test-obsolete itself or my use of it, use flags, some sort of database problem, etc.) or is this some sort of ebuild problem that will likely get worked out over the next few weeks? Thanks, Mark firefly ~ # eix -Ic poppler [I] app-text/poppler (0.12.3...@02/14/10): PDF rendering library based on the xpdf-3.0 code base firefly ~ # equery depends =app-text/poppler-0.12.3-r3 [ Searching for packages depending on =app-text/poppler-0.12.3-r3... ] app-misc/strigi-0.7.0 (>=app-text/poppler-0.12.3-r3[utils]) app-text/evince-2.26.2 (>=app-text/poppler-0.12.3-r3[cairo]) kde-base/okular-4.3.3 (pdf? >=app-text/poppler-0.12.3-r3[lcms,qt4]) net-print/cups-1.3.11-r1 (>=app-text/poppler-0.12.3-r3[utils]) virtual/poppler-0.12.3-r1 (~app-text/poppler-0.12.3[lcms?,xpdf-headers]) virtual/poppler-glib-0.12.3-r2 (~app-text/poppler-0.12.3[cairo]) virtual/poppler-qt4-0.12.3-r1 (~app-text/poppler-0.12.3[qt4]) virtual/poppler-utils-0.12.3-r1 (~app-text/poppler-0.12.3[abiword?,png?,utils]) firefly ~ # eix-test-obsolete -d No non-matching entries in /etc/portage/package.keywords. No non-matching entries in /etc/portage/package.mask. No non-matching entries in /etc/portage/package.unmask. No non-matching or empty entries in /etc/portage/package.use. No non-matching or empty entries in /etc/portage/package.cflags. The following installed packages are not in the database: virtual/poppler virtual/poppler-glib virtual/poppler-qt4 virtual/poppler-utils -- No redundant entries in /etc/portage/package.keywords (or test switched off). No redundant entries in /etc/portage/package.mask (or test switched off). No redundant entries in /etc/portage/package.unmask (or test switched off). No redundant entries in /etc/portage/package.use (or test switched off). No redundant entries in /etc/portage/package.cflags (or test switched off). No uninstalled entries in /etc/portage/package.keywords (or test switched off). No uninstalled entries in /etc/portage/package.mask (or test switched off). No uninstalled entries in /etc/portage/package.unmask (or test switched off). No uninstalled entries in /etc/portage/package.use (or test switched off). No uninstalled entries in /etc/portage/package.cflags (or test switched off). All installed versions of packages are in the database. firefly ~ # firefly ~ # slocate poppler | grep virtual /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-0.12.3-r1 /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-0.12.3-r1/COUNTER /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-0.12.3-r1/KEYWORDS /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-0.12.3-r1/DEFINED_PHASES /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-0.12.3-r1/PF /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-0.12.3-r1/PROPERTIES /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-0.12.3-r1/DEPEND /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-0.12.3-r1/DESCRIPTION /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-0.12.3-r1/USE /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-0.12.3-r1/FEATURES /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-0.12.3-r1/SLOT /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-0.12.3-r1/RDEPEND /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-0.12.3-r1/SIZE /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-0.12.3-r1/IUSE /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-0.12.3-r1/poppler-0.12.3-r1.ebuild /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-0.12.3-r1/CFLAGS /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-0.12.3-r1/environment.bz2 /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-0.12.3-r1/repository /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-0.12.3-r1/LDFLAGS /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-0.12.3-r1/EAPI /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-0.12.3-r1/CATEGORY /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-0.12.3-r1/CBUILD /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-0.12.3-r1/CXXFLAGS /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-0.12.3-r1/CHOST /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-0.12.3-r1/CONTENTS /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-glib-0.12.3-r2 /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-glib-0.12.3-r2/COUNTER /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-glib-0.12.3-r2/KEYWORDS /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-glib-0.12.3-r2/DEFINED_PHASES /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-glib-0.12.3-r2/PF /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-glib-0.12.3-r2/PROPERTIES /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-glib-0.12.3-r2/DEPEND /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-glib-0.12.3-r2/DESCRIPTION /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-glib-0.12.3-r2/USE /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-glib-0.12.3-r2/poppler-glib-0.12.3-r2.ebuild /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-glib-0.12.3-r2/FEATURES /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-glib-0.12.3-r2/SLOT /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-glib-0.12.3-r2/RDEPEND /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-glib-0.12.3-r2/SIZE /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-glib-0.12.3-r2/IUSE /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-glib-0.12.3-r2/CFLAGS /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-glib-0.12.3-r2/environment.bz2 /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-glib-0.12.3-r2/repository /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-glib-0.12.3-r2/LDFLAGS /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-glib-0.12.3-r2/EAPI /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-glib-0.12.3-r2/CATEGORY /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-glib-0.12.3-r2/CBUILD /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-glib-0.12.3-r2/CXXFLAGS /var/db/pkg/virtual/poppler-glib-0.12.3-r2/CHOST /var/db/pkg/virtual/popp
Re: [gentoo-user] poppler vs virtual/poppler & eix-test-obsolete
On Sun, Feb 14, 2010 at 12:18 PM, Alan McKinnon wrote: > On Sunday 14 February 2010 22:10:05 Mark Knecht wrote: >> Hi, >> Mostly in support of (I think) KDE I have poppler installed which >> seems to cause eix-test-obsolete a little indigestion. It sees >> virtual/poppler as installed but says they are not in the database. >> >> Do I have a problem here (eix-test-obsolete itself or my use of it, >> use flags, some sort of database problem, etc.) or is this some sort >> of ebuild problem that will likely get worked out over the next few >> weeks? > > I saw this a few days ago. > > virtual/poppler is not in portage anymore. We now just have regular poppler, > xpdf, et al. > > Just remove poppler from world if you have it there - you shouldn't, it's a > lib and should be pulled in by everything that DEPENDs on it. > > Latest masked portage deals with this kind of nonsense nicely. If you use an > old portage, you may have to unmerge what you have and remerge the real one. > > FWIW, poppler is one of those packages seemingly run by an insane idiot. Every > new minor point version seems to block the one before it, implying API/ABI > breaks across minor versions. Which is thick beyond belief. It's a problematic > package and one that I seemed to umerge/merge often in the pre-portage-2.2 > days > > -- > alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com > > Alan, poppler isn't in my world file: firefly ~ # cat /var/lib/portage/world | grep poppler firefly ~ # and I seem to be using the newest portage-2.2_rc62 although a slightly older portage-utils-0.2.1 Are you suggesting the I unmerge poppler and then do a revdep-rebuild (or emerge -DuN @world) to get it reinstalled without this problem? Easy enough if it works, but even if it works it seems something is brokern and before I destroy the symptom I thought I'd ask a couple of questions. I've read a couple of bug reports that echo your thoughts about the package. Thanks, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] poppler vs virtual/poppler & eix-test-obsolete
On Sun, Feb 14, 2010 at 1:33 PM, Stroller wrote: > > On 14 Feb 2010, at 20:31, Mark Knecht wrote: >> >> ... >> poppler isn't in my world file: >> ... >> Are you suggesting the I unmerge poppler and then do a >> revdep-rebuild (or emerge -DuN @world) to get it reinstalled without >> this problem? > > Yes. > > Stroller. Well, it's an interesting result, or I'm just getting tired. I really think that I tried emerge --depclean earlier and it didn't fix the problem. After emerge -C poppler/emerge poppler I was left with the same failure in eix-test-obsolete but this time emerge --depclean did get rid of the 4 virtuals. I don't know. I suspect now that I never did emerge --depclean. Thanks. It's fixed. Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] 1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? -> bar performance so far
2010/2/14 Willie Wong : > On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 01:48:01AM +0100, Frank Steinmetzger wrote: >> >> action SS (1st) SS (2nd) SS+2 SS+4 SS+6 SS+8 >> -+--+--+--+--+--+-- >> untar portage 3m12.517 2m55.916 1m46.663 1m35.341 1m47.829 >> 1m43.677 >> rm portage 4m11.109 3m54.950 3m18.820 3m11.378 3m21.804 >> 3m12.433 >> cp 1GB file0m21.383 0m13.558 0m14.920 0m12.813 0m13.407 >> 0m13.681 > > Instead of guessing using this rather imprecise metric, why not just > look up the serial number of your drive and see what the physical > sector size is? If you don't want to open your box, you can usually > get the information from dmesg. hdparm capital eye works very nicely: gandalf ~ # hdparm -I /dev/sda /dev/sda: ATA device, with non-removable media Model Number: WDC WD10EARS-00Y5B1 Serial Number: WD-WCAV55464493 Firmware Revision: 80.00A80 Transport: Serial, SATA 1.0a, SATA II Extensions, SATA Rev 2.5, SATA Rev 2.6 Standards: Supported: 8 7 6 5 Likely used: 8 > > Only caveat: don't trust the harddrive to report accurate geometry. > This whole issue is due to the harddrives lying about their physical > geometry to be compatible with older versions of Windows. So the > physical sector size listed in dmesg may not be the real one. Which is > why you are advised to look up the model number on the vendor's > website yourself to determine the physical sector size. > > W > -- > Willie W. Wong ww...@math.princeton.edu Very true... Since this thread started and you help (me at least1) understand what I was dealing with I got in contact with Mark Lord - the developer and maintainer of the hdparm program. I was interested in seeing if we could get hdparm to recognize this aspect of the drive. He was very interested and asked me to send along additional info which he then analyzed and decided that, at least at this time, even drives that we __know__ are 4K sector sizes are not implementing any way of reading it from the drive's firmware which is supported, at least in the newer SATA specs. With that he decided that even for his own new 4K drives he cannot do anything except either assume they are 4K and partition appropriately or look up specs specifically as you suggest. Currently I'm partial to the idea that all my sector starting addresses will end in '000'. It's easy to remember and at most that wastes (I think) 512K bytes between sectors so it's not much in terms of the overall disk space. Just a couple of megabyte on a drive with 4 partitions. = Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Can't hear anything. :-(
On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 6:54 AM, Alan Mackenzie wrote: > Hi, gentoo, > > I'm trying to get sound to sound on my new Gentoo box, following the > "Gentoo Linux ALSA Guide". Everything seems to be working fine, except > no sound is coming out of my loudspeakers. > > I've checked the obvious things: the speakers are plugged in, switched > on and connected to the appropriate socket on my motherboard (the light > green one). > > I have drivers for my motherboard's sound chips compiled into my kernel, > and they are correctly identified by alsamixer. With alsamixer I've > unmuted various things and turned up the volume. > > madplay appears to play an mp3 file I have. Just that no actual sound > comes out. > > One other strange thing: the titles under the "volume bars" in alsamixer > are very different from the ones in the document: Instead of "Master / > Headphone / Tone / Bass / Treble / 3D Contr / PCM", I've got " Master / > Headphon / Front / Front Mi / Surround / Center / LFE / Side / Line / > Mic / Mic Boos / S/PDIF / S/PDIF D / Beep". Why is this? In > particular, I'm missing the "PCM" volume bar which the documentation > says is so important to unmute. > > What am I missing here? > > Thanks in advance! > > -- > Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany). > Did you get this worked out yet? VERY strange that you don't see pcm as a mixer control... It's a bit hard to say much with so little info but I'll offer a couple of things: 1) IMO Alsa has never run so well when drivers are compiled into the kernel. I do a lot of audio in Linux and have always had the best results using modules. I would strongly suggest you give it a try... 2) Under /proc/asound/card0 (or whatever card you are using if you have more than 1) do you see any pcm directories? 3) Post back a little more info? cat /proc/asound/cards aplay -l aplay -L lsmod Good luck, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Can't hear anything. :-(
On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 1:15 AM, Alan Mackenzie wrote: > Hi, Mark, > > >> VERY strange that you don't see pcm as a mixer control... > > I've got alsamixer 1.0.21. Could it be that it choses its controls > according to the capabilities of the sound card? > OK, so did you run alsaconf? This will often (but in my experience not always) unmute everything required to get sound. However MANY people (including myself for about a day) have had problems with the HDA-Intel stuff. I'm not exactly sure what HDA ATI SB means thought. If alsaconf finds and unmutes what you need to get sound then alsa run alsactl store to save state. BTW - On a new motherboard I found the Intel HDA analog output (the green plug is analog) wouldn't drive cheap speakers at all. I get sound on that output if I use headphones or a power amp but nothing at all when driving cheap speakers with no power amp. That's the first motherboard I've had which had this problem. If you have some good headphones give them a try. OK - what did you put in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa? Here's mine: firefly ~ # cat /etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf # ALSA portion alias char-major-116 snd # OSS/Free portion alias char-major-14 soundcore ### IMPORTANT: ### You need to customise this section for your specific sound card(s) ### and then run `update-modules' command. ### Read alsa-driver's INSTALL file in /usr/share/doc for more info. ### ### ALSA portion alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel options snd-hda-intel index=0 alias snd-card-1 snd-hdsp options snd-hdsp index=1 ### OSS/Free portion alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0 #alias sound-slot-1 snd-card-1 ### # ## OSS/Free portion - card #1 alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss ### OSS/Free portion - card #2 ### alias sound-service-1-0 snd-mixer-oss ### alias sound-service-1-3 snd-pcm-oss ### alias sound-service-1-12 snd-pcm-oss # alias /dev/mixer snd-mixer-oss alias /dev/dsp snd-pcm-oss alias /dev/midi snd-seq-oss # ## Set this to the correct number of cards. options snd cards_limit=2 # firefly ~ # >> It's a bit hard to say much with so little info but I'll offer a >> couple of things: > >> 1) IMO Alsa has never run so well when drivers are compiled into the >> kernel. I do a lot of audio in Linux and have always had the best >> results using modules. I would strongly suggest you give it a try... > > Oh deity! I was hoping not to have to do this. I've never used modules > before, since they are (or were) an unnecessary complication, and might > introduce security risks. Maybe I'll have to read up on this. OK - I get that you don't want to, and that you have good reasons, but I'm suggesting you do it at least for debug. Once you have it working you can try building them into the kernel. I will report that I've had trouble over the years doing this, but I've used a lot of strange cards here so maybe it's old issues that have been fixed. I know the Alsa developers used to insist we do it with modules. That was 1999-2000 so likely it's all fixed but I still use modules here. > >> 2) Under /proc/asound/card0 (or whatever card you are using if you >> have more than 1) do you see any pcm directories? > > # ls /proc/asound/card0 > codec#0 id oss_mixer pcm0c pcm0p pcm1p pcm2c > > , so yes, I can see some pcm directories. > >> 3) Post back a little more info? > >> cat /proc/asound/cards > > 0 [SB ]: HDA-Intel - HDA ATI SB > HDA ATI SB at 0xfbcf8000 irq 16 > 1 [HDMI ]: HDA-Intel - HDA ATI HDMI > HDA ATI HDMI at 0xfbffc000 irq 19 > > >> aplay -l > > List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices > card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 0: ALC1200 Analog [ALC1200 Analog] > Subdevices: 1/1 > Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 > card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 1: ALC1200 Digital [ALC1200 Digital] > Subdevices: 1/1 > Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 > card 1: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 3: ATI HDMI [ATI HDMI] > Subdevices: 1/1 > Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 > >> aplay -L > > default:CARD=SB > HDA ATI SB, ALC1200 Analog > Default Audio Device > front:CARD=SB,DEV=0 > HDA ATI SB, ALC1200 Analog > Front speakers > surround40:CARD=SB,DEV=0 > HDA ATI SB, ALC1200 Analog > 4.0 Surround output to Front and Rear speakers > surround41:CARD=SB,DEV=0 > HDA ATI SB, ALC1200 Analog > 4.1 Surround output to Front, Rear and Subwoofer speakers > surround50:CARD=SB,DEV=0 > HDA ATI SB, ALC1200 Analog > 5.0 Surround output to Front, Center and Rear speakers > surround51:CARD=SB,DEV=0 > HDA ATI SB, ALC1200 Analog > 5.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Rear and Subwoofer speakers > surround71:CARD=SB,DEV=0 > HDA ATI SB, ALC1200 Analog > 7.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Side, Rear and Woofer speakers > iec958:CARD=SB,DE
[gentoo-user] CUPS - Some apps see printers, some do not
Hi, I'm looking around in vain for info on why some apps (Open Office apps for instance) see printers while other apps (Evolution and Firefox for instance) do not. Apps that don't work seem to offer print to file and print to LPR. On the other hand Open Office provides only the obscenely ugly CUPS printer name "HP_LaserJet_M1522nf_MFP_192.168.1.5". The printer does work from Open Office and printing test pages. Are default names like that a problem for Gnome which is the environment my dad is using? The machine is remote so I'm having to ssh in and run apps remotely. On my machine running Gnome I didn't find any global configuration for printing in the system menus. I typically run XFCE so I'm not deeply familiar with what Gnome offers in terms of printer setup. Thanks in advance, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: CUPS - Some apps see printers, some do not
On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 7:53 PM, walt wrote: > On 02/23/2010 06:23 PM, Mark Knecht wrote: >> >> Hi, >> I'm looking around in vain for info on why some apps (Open Office >> apps for instance) see printers while other apps (Evolution and >> Firefox for instance) do not. Apps that don't work seem to offer print >> to file and print to LPR. On the other hand Open Office provides only >> the obscenely ugly CUPS printer name >> "HP_LaserJet_M1522nf_MFP_192.168.1.5". > > Ugly? I think it's quite fetching, really. Are you sure you're a real > computer nerd? > > I have an HP LaserJet 3015 that works with everything in my gnome DE, > but IIRC I struggled until I discovered the net-print/hplip package, > which is the opensource driver supplied by HP. It does everything > including faxing, printing, and high-res color scanning all from my > HP multi-function printer. > > Does your dad's machine have that package installed and configured? > > > Yes, version 3.9.12-r1 is installed but I'm not totally sure I'm using the driver it supplied. gandalf ~ # emerge -pv hplip These are the packages that would be merged, in order: Calculating dependencies... done! [ebuild R ] net-print/hplip-3.9.12-r1 USE="gtk hpcups libnotify qt4 -doc -fax -hpijs -minimal -new-hpcups -parport -policykit -scanner -snmp -static-ppds -udev-acl" 0 kB Total: 1 package (1 reinstall), Size of downloads: 0 kB * IMPORTANT: 1 news items need reading for repository 'gentoo'. * Use eselect news to read news items. gandalf ~ # # Printer configuration file for CUPS v1.3.11 # Written by cupsd on 2010-02-23 11:32 Info HP LaserJet M1522nf MFP Location Local Printer DeviceURI socket://192.168.1.5 State Idle StateTime 1266953458 Accepting Yes Shared Yes JobSheets none none QuotaPeriod 0 PageLimit 0 KLimit 0 OpPolicy default ErrorPolicy stop-printer Again, I figured it was working because Open Office finds it without any trouble, but his Gnome account doesn't. (Nor does mine actually - I cannot print from Firefox in my account either.) Thanks, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: CUPS - Some apps see printers, some do not
On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 2:28 AM, Helmut Jarausch wrote: > On 23 Feb, Mark Knecht wrote: >> On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 7:53 PM, walt wrote: >>> On 02/23/2010 06:23 PM, Mark Knecht wrote: >>>> >>>> Hi, >>>> I'm looking around in vain for info on why some apps (Open Office >>>> apps for instance) see printers while other apps (Evolution and >>>> Firefox for instance) do not. Apps that don't work seem to offer print >>>> to file and print to LPR. On the other hand Open Office provides only >>>> the obscenely ugly CUPS printer name >>>> "HP_LaserJet_M1522nf_MFP_192.168.1.5". >>> > > Just one note, > are you using a binary version of firefox, etc, on a 64 bit machine? > I had the same problem here. > This was easily solved by replacing the binary version by the native > (freshly compiled) version here. > Helmut. > > -- > Helmut Jarausch Thanks but no. In fact the one binary thing on the system that comes to mind is Open Office in which printing is working. It's the stuff I'm building that isn't! - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: CUPS - Some apps see printers, some do not
On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 7:34 AM, walt wrote: > On 02/23/2010 09:39 PM, Mark Knecht wrote: > >> >> # Printer configuration file for CUPS v1.3.11 >> # Written by cupsd on 2010-02-23 11:32 >> >> Info HP LaserJet M1522nf MFP >> Location Local Printer >> DeviceURI socket://192.168.1.5 >> State Idle >> StateTime 1266953458 >> Accepting Yes >> Shared Yes >> JobSheets none none >> QuotaPeriod 0 >> PageLimit 0 >> KLimit 0 >> OpPolicy default >> ErrorPolicy stop-printer >> >> >> Again, I figured it was working because Open Office finds it without >> any trouble, but his Gnome account doesn't. (Nor does mine actually - >> I cannot print from Firefox in my account either.) > > Can firefox see the cups html interface at localhost:631 ? > Yes - that's how I'm administering the machine as it's 350 miles away. >From the CUPS interface at port 631 I can delete the printer, add the printer automatically - CUPS finds it when I ask it to look for new printers - and I can print test pages form within the management interface. I can run Open Office and print pages on the printer. OO sees the printer with the exact big, ugly name I left as default in CUPS. My dad says the pages show up and he's right because he reads me what I typed in. It's all the other apps I've tried remotely (Evolution in my dad's account & Firefox in mine) that don't find the printer. Curious... Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: CUPS - Some apps see printers, some do not
On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 8:21 AM, james wrote: > Mark Knecht gmail.com> writes: > >> the one binary thing on the system that comes >> to mind is Open Office in which printing is working. It's the stuff >> I'm building that isn't! > > > Have you set the "cups" flag in make.conf? > > It may or maynot make a difference. > > > > hth, > James It is not globally set and setting it causes a number of things to get installed and rebuilt including gnome-cups-manager. Sounds like a good use flag in this case. Rebuilding now. Maybe in an hour we'll have an answer. Thanks! - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: CUPS - Some apps see printers, some do not
On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 9:17 AM, Mark Knecht wrote: > On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 8:21 AM, james wrote: >> Mark Knecht gmail.com> writes: >> >>> the one binary thing on the system that comes >>> to mind is Open Office in which printing is working. It's the stuff >>> I'm building that isn't! >> >> >> Have you set the "cups" flag in make.conf? >> >> It may or maynot make a difference. >> >> >> >> hth, >> James > > It is not globally set and setting it causes a number of things to get > installed and rebuilt including gnome-cups-manager. Sounds like a good > use flag in this case. > > Rebuilding now. Maybe in an hour we'll have an answer. > > Thanks! > > - Mark > Thanks James. At least for me remotely that enabled printing from within Firefox. Waiting now for my dad to check it out locally. Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: CUPS - Some apps see printers, some do not
On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 10:53 AM, wrote: > james wrote: > >>> >>> Mark Knecht gmail.com> writes: >>> >>> > the one binary thing on the system that comes >>> > to mind is Open Office in which printing is working. It's the stuff >>> > I'm building that isn't! >>> >>> >>> Have you set the "cups" flag in make.conf? >>> >>> It may or maynot make a difference. >>> >>> >>> >>> hth, >>> James >>> > > No, I copied the make.conf from a different machine a decided I nver > needed it :( > > I've enabled it now, but another thing is it safe to delete an entry > from my world file, so when I update it isn't everything? > -- > Regards, > Roundyz > > Try equery hasuse cups on my machine it was only something like 8 or 9 packages. It might not be a real big problem to enable it globally. It did work for me. - Mark
[gentoo-user] How to untar without first knowing the tar contents?
Hi, I backed up my wife's home directory using tar in preparation to moving her to a new machine but I don't remember the exact command I used to do the tar command. When I tried to untar on the new machine it failed to do anything. (except use 30 minutes of CPU time...) MacMini home # tar -xjf /mnt/cdrom/evelyn.20100214.tar.bz2 /home/evelyn/ tar: /home/evelyn: Not found in archive tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors MacMini home # I'm currently running tar -tz /mnt/cdrom/evelyn.20100214.tar.bz2 and it's been going 15 minutes without writing anything to the screen. I assume that I need to list the contents of the tar file to figure out how to untar but I'm really not sure. How do I best proceed? Thanks, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] How to untar without first knowing the tar contents?
On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 10:18 AM, Florian Philipp wrote: > Mark Knecht schrieb: >> Hi, >> I backed up my wife's home directory using tar in preparation to >> moving her to a new machine but I don't remember the exact command I >> used to do the tar command. When I tried to untar on the new machine >> it failed to do anything. (except use 30 minutes of CPU time...) >> >> MacMini home # tar -xjf /mnt/cdrom/evelyn.20100214.tar.bz2 /home/evelyn/ >> tar: /home/evelyn: Not found in archive >> tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors >> MacMini home # >> >> I'm currently running >> >> tar -tz /mnt/cdrom/evelyn.20100214.tar.bz2 >> >> and it's been going 15 minutes without writing anything to the screen. >> I assume that I need to list the contents of the tar file to figure >> out how to untar but I'm really not sure. >> >> How do I best proceed? >> >> Thanks, >> Mark >> > > Err, your tar commands are a bit wrong. > > tar -xjf /mnt/cdrom/evelyn.20100214.tar.bz2 /home/evelyn/ > tells tar to extract the parts of it which are under home/evelyn to the > working directory. > This might be what you wanted in the first place but I guess you rather want > tar -xjf /mnt/cdrom/evelyn.20100214.tar.bz2 -C /home/evelyn/ > which means extracting the complete content of the tar file to /home/evelyn. > > Your second command ... well, where to start: > 1. Since you didn't use the -f switch (as you did correctly in the first > command), tar expects input from stdin, not as a file specified on > commandline. That's why it hasn't done anything in the last 15 minutes. > > 2. With -z you specify that the file is compressed with gzip but the > file ending shows its compressed with bzip2. That's the -j switch > (again, correct in your first command). > > By the way: You should enable the -p switch when extracting the files in > order to restore permissions and so forth. > > Hope this helps! > Florian Philipp > > Wow! I'm really bad! I didn't get that about stdin at all. Never dawned on me... Stupid me... Thanks Florian! OK, using Neil's suggestion tar tfv archivername results in the first few lines: MacMini ~ # tar tvf /mnt/cdrom/evelyn.20100214.tar.bz2 drwx-- evelyn/users 0 2010-02-13 14:50 home/evelyn/ drwx-- evelyn/users 0 2008-04-11 17:33 home/evelyn/.AbiSuite/ -rw-r--r-- evelyn/users 2614 2008-07-24 01:18 home/evelyn/.AbiSuite/AbiWord.Profile drwxr-xr-x evelyn/users 0 2010-02-12 19:21 home/evelyn/.xine/ drwxr-xr-x evelyn/users 0 2007-09-19 13:36 home/evelyn/.xine/cddbcache/ -rw-r--r-- evelyn/users761 2007-09-19 13:36 home/evelyn/.xine/cddbcache/5e0 so I tried tar xfv /mnt/cdrom/evelyn.20100214.tar.bz2 -C / and because /home/evelyn already exists the files seemed to end up in the right place. Thanks, Mark
[gentoo-user] recovery from /var corruption?
So I got my wife's machine booted today using a install disk and played a bit with e2fsck. The machine stopped being happy last night due to some sort of corruption on the /var partition. e2fsck complained about 3 or 4 files and then repaired the partition. The machine booted cleanly as far as I can tell. So, something went bad and I managed to sneak around it for a while and now I'm sort of living with the machine wondering what to do. Do I just watch the logs looking for problems? I have no way of knowing right now whether this was a disk problem that's going to come back, a 1 time deal due to power, or something else entirely. As these cheap machines that don't use RAID what's the right way to go? emerge -e @world and then wait for the next event? Do nothing and wait? We've got decent personal data backups as well as basic /etc data. Thanks, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] recovery from /var corruption?
On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 1:46 AM, Alex Schuster wrote: > Mark Knecht writes: > >> Do I just watch the logs looking for problems? I have no way of >> knowing right now whether this was a disk problem that's going to come >> back, a 1 time deal due to power, or something else entirely. >> >> As these cheap machines that don't use RAID what's the right way to >> go? emerge -e @world and then wait for the next event? Do nothing and >> wait? > > Emerge smartmontools, then: > > smartctl -h /dev/sda # get overview of what the drive thinks about itself > > smartctl -t short /dev/sda # start short self test > Wait > smartctl -l selftest /dev/sda # see results > > smartctl -t long /dev/sda # start long self test > Wait a lot longer > smartctl -l selftest /dev/sda # see results > > You can continue working in the meanwhile, there will be no performance > impact. You will see something like this in the log: > > === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === > SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1 > Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) > LBA_of_first_error > # 1 Short offline Completed without error 00% 2275 - > # 2 Extended offline Completed without error 00% 2270 - > # 3 Extended offline Completed without error 00% 1799 - > # 4 Extended offline Completed without error 00% 197 - > # 5 Extended offline Completed without error 00% 26 - > > I you have a '-' in the right column, the disk has found no errors. If > there is a number, than it's the position of the first error. > > There's also badblocks, this will check every block and output the bad > ones: badblocks -sv /dev/sda > > badblocks -svn /dev/sda will do a read-write test. In case of a bad block, > the drive should exchange it with a spare one. Maybe this happens already > in read-only mode, I am not sure. > > Also watch for errors in syslog or via dmesg, there should be some when > bad blocks are being accessed. > > Wonko > > Hi Wonko, Yes, I do use smartctl on some other machines although I'm not very good about it and your write-up is helpful so thanks for that. My wife's machines is older and and I don't think SMART is supported on her drive. Note the lack of a * on the SMART line in hdparm -I: dragonfly ~ # hdparm -I /dev/hda /dev/hda: ATA device, with non-removable media Model Number: WDC WD1600BB-00FTA0 Serial Number: WD-WMAES2091586 Firmware Revision: 15.05R15 Standards: Supported: 6 5 4 Likely used: 6 Configuration: Logical max current cylinders 16383 16383 heads 16 16 sectors/track 63 63 -- CHS current addressable sectors: 16514064 LBAuser addressable sectors: 268435455 LBA48 user addressable sectors: 312581808 Logical/Physical Sector size: 512 bytes device size with M = 1024*1024: 152627 MBytes device size with M = 1000*1000: 160041 MBytes (160 GB) cache/buffer size = 2048 KBytes (type=DualPortCache) Capabilities: LBA, IORDY(can be disabled) Standby timer values: spec'd by Standard, with device specific minimum R/W multiple sector transfer: Max = 16 Current = 16 Recommended acoustic management value: 128, current value: 254 DMA: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5 Cycle time: min=120ns recommended=120ns PIO: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4 Cycle time: no flow control=120ns IORDY flow control=120ns Commands/features: Enabled Supported: SMART feature set Security Mode feature set *Power Management feature set *Write cache *Look-ahead *Host Protected Area feature set *WRITE_BUFFER command *READ_BUFFER command *DOWNLOAD_MICROCODE SET_MAX security extension Automatic Acoustic Management feature set *48-bit Address feature set *Device Configuration Overlay feature set *Mandatory FLUSH_CACHE *FLUSH_CACHE_EXT *SMART error logging *SMART self-test Security: supported not enabled not locked not frozen not expired: security count not supported: enhanced erase HW reset results: CBLID- above Vih Device num = 0 determined by CSEL Checksum: correct dragonfly ~ # dragonfly ~ # smartctl -H /dev/hda smartctl version 5.38 [i686-pc-linux-gn
Re: [gentoo-user] recovery from /var corruption?
On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 8:01 AM, Alex Schuster wrote:
> Mark Knecht writes:
>
>> Yes, I do use smartctl on some other machines although I'm not very
>> good about it and your write-up is helpful so thanks for that.
>>
>> My wife's machines is older and and I don't think SMART is
>> supported on her drive. Note the lack of a * on the SMART line in
>> hdparm -I:
>
> Okay, but it still states:
>
>> * SMART error logging
>> * SMART self-test
>
> So maybe smartctl -t long /dev/hda still works? Just give it a try.
No, -t long fails the same way. Basically every time I try to use
smartctl on the drive it seems to issue one of these 3-line reports
about SectorIDNotFound in dmesg. My other machines don't do this. Not
a good sign I think...
hda: task_no_data_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: task_no_data_intr: error=0x10 { SectorIdNotFound },
LBAsect=16777008, sector=18446744073709551615
hda: possibly failed opcode: 0xb0
hda: task_no_data_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: task_no_data_intr: error=0x10 { SectorIdNotFound },
LBAsect=262192, sector=18446744073709551615
hda: possibly failed opcode: 0xb0
hda: task_no_data_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: task_no_data_intr: error=0x10 { SectorIdNotFound }, LBAsect=48,
sector=18446744073709551615
hda: possibly failed opcode: 0xb0
These command create the same sort of lines in dmesg:
dragonfly ~ # smartctl -i /dev/hda
smartctl version 5.38 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: Western Digital Caviar family
Device Model: WDC WD1600BB-00FTA0
Serial Number:WD-WMAES2091586
Firmware Version: 15.05R15
User Capacity:160,041,885,696 bytes
Device is:In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is: 6
ATA Standard is: Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated
Local Time is:Fri Feb 26 08:49:00 2010 PST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Disabled
SMART Disabled. Use option -s with argument 'on' to enable it.
dragonfly ~ # smartctl -P show /dev/hda
smartctl version 5.38 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
Drive found in smartmontools Database. Drive identity strings:
MODEL: WDC WD1600BB-00FTA0
FIRMWARE: 15.05R15
match smartmontools Drive Database entry:
MODEL REGEXP: ^WDC WD(2|3|4|6|8|10|12|16|18|20|25)00BB-.*$
FIRMWARE REGEXP:.*
MODEL FAMILY: Western Digital Caviar family
ATTRIBUTE OPTIONS: None preset; no -v options are required.
dragonfly ~ #
>>
>> I've not tried the -T permissive options.
>
> I would :) There is also a BIOS setting for SMART, but I think this does
> not matter here, and it's only for being able to report a failing drive
> before booting.
Tried -T permissive and -T verypermissive. Same result. More lines and
told it's not turning on.
Could this have ANYTHING to do with kernel configuation? Is there
anything required at the kernel level that I might not have turned on?
>
>> I've never used badblocks as it seems I should only do that off-line.
>> This might be a good time to boot with a CD and try it out.
>
> In read-only mode, you can use it when the system is running. Only the
> write test (option -n) refuses to run if partitions are mounted from the
> drive. So I'd do the 'badblocks -sv /dev/hda' right now, if you do not
> need the drive at full speed for a while. You can interrupt it at any
> point with Ctrl-Z and continue with the fg command.
>
OK, I've started that test and will report back later what it says.
Thanks!
- Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] recovery from /var corruption?
On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 9:27 AM, Alex Schuster wrote:
> Mark Knecht writes:
>
>> On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 8:01 AM, Alex Schuster
>> wrote:
>
>> > Okay, but it still states:
>> >> * SMART error logging
>> >> * SMART self-test
>> >
>> > So maybe smartctl -t long /dev/hda still works? Just give it a try.
>>
>> No, -t long fails the same way. Basically every time I try to use
>> smartctl on the drive it seems to issue one of these 3-line reports
>> about SectorIDNotFound in dmesg. My other machines don't do this. Not
>> a good sign I think...
>>
>> hda: task_no_data_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
>> hda: task_no_data_intr: error=0x10 { SectorIdNotFound },
>> LBAsect=16777008, sector=18446744073709551615
>> hda: possibly failed opcode: 0xb0
>
> Uh-oh. Okay, I guess it just won't work then.
>
>
>> Could this have ANYTHING to do with kernel configuation? Is there
>> anything required at the kernel level that I might not have turned on?
>
> I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with the kernel, but with your drive
> being incapable of the SMART commands.
>
> But I guess using badblocks is not that different in the end. The SMART
> selftest runs in the background and does not create disk I/O, but I think
> it does nothing so much different from badblocks.
>
> Wonko
>
>
The machine _mostly_ crashed while running badblocks. I say mostly
because the mouse is still alive but I can no longer ssh in and cannot
open a terminal on my wife's desktop or get to the console.
I tried to Ctrl-C out out of badblocks here (this is running shelled
in) before I figured out it was a total crash which messed up the
terminal a bit but you can see what it was reporting before the crash
dragonfly ~ # badblocks -sv /dev/hda
Checking blocks 0 to 156290903
Checking for bad blocks (read-only test): 89360960done, 35:00 elapsed
89360961done, 35:09 elapsed
89360962
89360963
^C^C18% done, 35:27 elapsed
So, there seem to be problems, possibly with the drive, or maybe it's
some sort of overheating problem on the processor and this was just
the way the processor failed before the crash?
I ran memtest86 night before last for 8 hours and had no memory
problems. I'll remove memory and PCI cards, reseat everything, and
then see what happens.
- Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] recovery from /var corruption?
On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 9:59 AM, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: > On Freitag 26 Februar 2010, Mark Knecht wrote: > >> >> The machine _mostly_ crashed while running badblocks. I say mostly >> because the mouse is still alive but I can no longer ssh in and cannot >> open a terminal on my wife's desktop or get to the console. > > because it is not crashed but waiting for the ide timeouts. So if I let it continue running is it going to come back in the next hour or two? I am assuming the IDE timeouts are because the drive is having trouble, correct? That's the theory here? If so then unless the software can mark them bad and somehow create good files out of bad then I'm still left with a machine that is going to need serious work done before it's a happy box again, correct? On the other hand, because I have reasonably good user backups (although no real system backups) right now if I bite the bullet and build the machine then when my wife gets it back it's hopefully going to be more reliable, wouldn't it? I'm thinking that maybe I just copy a little stuff off the box - /etc and the like - and then boot the machine with the Gentoo install CD or System Resuce CD and see what the drive is doing? That doesn't cost me anything to look around, but if SMART won't turn on and badblocks is suggesting the drive is having trouble maybe running something like badblocks and actually __marking__ blocks as bad and then reloading Gentoo would work in the long run? (A lot of work though.) I'm really not interested in buying new drive because the machine is ATA100/133 and if it's not the drive then the money is wasted for a new machine. The cheapest at NewEgg is about $40. Why spend the buck for an old Intel Centrino machine? > >> >> I tried to Ctrl-C out out of badblocks here (this is running shelled >> in) before I figured out it was a total crash which messed up the >> terminal a bit but you can see what it was reporting before the crash >> >> dragonfly ~ # badblocks -sv /dev/hda >> Checking blocks 0 to 156290903 >> Checking for bad blocks (read-only test): 89360960done, 35:00 elapsed >> 89360961done, 35:09 elapsed >> 89360962 >> 89360963 >> ^C^C18% done, 35:27 elapsed >> >> So, there seem to be problems, possibly with the drive, or maybe it's >> some sort of overheating problem on the processor and this was just >> the way the processor failed before the crash? >> >> I ran memtest86 night before last for 8 hours and had no memory >> problems. I'll remove memory and PCI cards, reseat everything, and >> then see what happens. > > protip: if you are running badblocks (or ddrescue) on a probably damaged > device - attach it with an usb adapter. That way your box is still usable. > > /me hates linux kernel for making processes in D unkillable and sucking very > much on diskio. > > Good inputs. Thanks! Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] recovery from /var corruption?
On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 10:26 AM, Mark Knecht wrote: > > On the other hand, because I have reasonably good user backups > (although no real system backups) right now if I bite the bullet and > build the machine then when my wife gets it back it's hopefully going > to be more reliable, wouldn't it? > > I'm thinking that maybe I just copy a little stuff off the box - /etc > and the like - and then boot the machine with the Gentoo install CD or > System Resuce CD and see what the drive is doing? > As a related idea I dug out an old copy of Spinrite which I'll run on all the partitions just to see what it says. However if the problem is currently 1 partition (/var) which is still mostly readable, could I not just create a new var partition - the drive has space free - and then copy important stuff from old var to new var, change fstab and then basically just go on from there? Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] recovery from /var corruption?
On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 9:38 AM, daid kahl wrote: > On 26 February 2010 12:33, Mark Knecht wrote: >> So I got my wife's machine booted today using a install disk and >> played a bit with e2fsck. The machine stopped being happy last night >> due to some sort of corruption on the /var partition. e2fsck >> complained about 3 or 4 files and then repaired the partition. The >> machine booted cleanly as far as I can tell. >> >> So, something went bad and I managed to sneak around it for a while >> and now I'm sort of living with the machine wondering what to do. >> >> Do I just watch the logs looking for problems? I have no way of >> knowing right now whether this was a disk problem that's going to come >> back, a 1 time deal due to power, or something else entirely. >> >> As these cheap machines that don't use RAID what's the right way to >> go? emerge -e @world and then wait for the next event? Do nothing and >> wait? >> >> We've got decent personal data backups as well as basic /etc data. >> >> Thanks, >> Mark >> > > I reconsidered your problem, and I actually wonder if emerging world > is a valid notion in this case, as the world file is under /var and > this is reported as corrupt. > > In this sense, it may be entirely non-trivial to regenerate (without > backup) the correct world-file for a system. > > Am I out in the deep end, or is this, in fact, the critical point that > needs consideration here? > > ~daid Hi daid, In general you are correct. If I didn't have a copy of the world file then it would be a bit hit and miss. In this case I do have it saved elsewhere so it's actually quite easy. This failure is more (it seems) a few bad blocks on one partition and not a total drive failure. I'm leaning toward a new /var partition and just ignoring the partition that has problems. It will sit on the disk but it's only 10GB out of 160GB so it's not the end of the world by any means. Thanks! - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Who believes in cylinders?
On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 4:09 PM, walt wrote: > The recent thread about the new disks with 1024-byte sectors has me > even more confused. Very sorry. ;-) > > IIUC the new disks *do* care (at least) about where a partition > begins relative to it's own 1024-byte hardware sectors, and that > part makes perfect sense. And that is really the important point from that thread. > > But, to me, that still leaves the "cylinder" as a completely useless > fiction that needs to join MSDOS in the scrap heap of history. I believe you're correct. > > Am I right to separate the 1024-byte sector problem from "cylinders" > as being two entirely different and orthogonal ideas? Yes. Cylinders do exist on the disk but they are not something to be used anymore. > > Is there really any need for the "cylinder" these days? No, not as I understand it. There may be some bits of software that suggest they can use them, but I think with the advent of LBA directly addressing CHS is now retired with only sector addressing being important due to the way the data is physically placed on the drive. Who cares what cylinder it's on, and who cares which head is getting the data? It doesn't matter to us users... Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Who believes in cylinders?
On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 8:53 AM, walt wrote: > On 02/26/2010 06:23 PM, BRM wrote: >> >> - Original Message ---- >> >>> From: Mark Knecht >>> On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 4:09 PM, walt wrote: >>>> >>>> Is there really any need for the "cylinder" these days? > >>> Who cares what cylinder it's on, and >>> who cares which head is getting the data? It doesn't matter to us >>> users... > >> ...Boot Loader writers (e.g. grub) need to care about it since LBA > >> is not quite available right away - you have to focus on other things >> until you can load the rest of the boot loader. > > Ah, this may be a big part of what's confusing me because I've done a > lot of playing around with grub. > > At what point *does* LBA become available, and who makes it available? > Is this one of those stupid BIOS things? > I don't think that it's specifically a BIOS thing, but BIOS is involved at least on older machines. LBA is always 'available' (as far as I know) because it's in the hard drive. It's the way the drive expects the system to talk to it. The issue is how do the software layers talk with the drive. In the case of very old PC hardware, and I think it still exists for compatibility reasons, programs used to use a IBM BIOS call - Int13 I think - to talk to the drive at all. I'm not a software guy, and certainly not an IBM BIOS assembly language guy, but it may be that the Int13 call to BIOS required CHS. I don't know. Basically you have to make some sort of call to find the drive and get things moving. If BIOS enables LBA under the hood, which I expect it does these days, then the Int13 call using CHS gets converted to LBA and sent across the cable. The drive is however (I think) ALWAYS responding to LBA. There's not a lot of reason for them to support anything else excpet for internal testing. Note that since CHS to LBA conversion is just a bunch of integer multiples and adds if the system BIOS takes an Int13 call with CHS as input it's simple for it to convert it to LBA, and since the important part is sector alignment which is the least significant part it's the one that most closely matches with the numbers in the LBA. I'm pretty sure that once your system starts booting the consistent use of LBA through the whole stack happens as the kernel gets itself and appropriate drivers loaded, but again, this is all supposition on my part. Once those are up and running it's probably LBA completely and CHS isn't important. Note that for big drives it seems that fdisk will __always__ tell me the drive has 63 sectors/track and 255 heads but I sincerely doubt that's true physically. Hope this helps, and I hope I'm not too far off base. Read more here and help me understand better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_block_addressing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INT13 Cheers, Mark
[gentoo-user] Gentoo down?
I guess the web site is down this morning? (6:30AM PST) I cannot get through anyway. - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo down?
On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 6:27 AM, Crístian Viana wrote: > yeah, it's really down: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/www.gentoo.org > > On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 11:24 AM, Mark Knecht wrote: >> >> I guess the web site is down this morning? (6:30AM PST) I cannot get >> through anyway. >> >> - Mark Cool little site. Thanks for the link! - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Gentoo down?
On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 7:05 AM, Lie Ryan wrote: > On 03/02/10 01:24, Mark Knecht wrote: >> I guess the web site is down this morning? (6:30AM PST) I cannot get >> through anyway. >> >> - Mark > > Confirmed, though I can still ping it. > > > Guess I'll have to wait for some nvidia installation instructions. Thanks!
[gentoo-user] nvidia GeForce 6200 questions
Hi, I've been trying to get an nvidia controller working today and not having much luck. It's complaining about failing to load kernel module. As a starting point I'm following this guide: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/nvidia-guide.xml My nvidia device is (I think) a GeForce 6 family card: dragonfly ~ # lspci | grep VGA 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV44A [GeForce 6200] (rev a1) dragonfly ~ # and from this nVidia page seems to be supported by the 173.xx series drivers: http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_ia32_173.14.25.html Because modinfo nvidia suggested it depended on them I've added agpgart and i2c-core to modules.autoload and after booting this is what's loaded: dragonfly ~ # lsmod Module Size Used by ipv6 176929 18 sg 19077 0 usb_storage29021 0 usbhid 18281 0 snd_intel8x0 19155 0 snd_ac97_codec 76628 1 snd_intel8x0 ac97_bus 662 1 snd_ac97_codec snd_pcm42338 2 snd_intel8x0,snd_ac97_codec ehci_hcd 27089 0 uhci_hcd 15779 0 snd_timer 11966 1 snd_pcm usbcore87247 4 usb_storage,usbhid,ehci_hcd,uhci_hcd agpgart19136 0 snd31592 4 snd_intel8x0,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm,snd_timer 8139cp 12993 0 soundcore 3607 1 snd rtc 6022 0 8139too14560 0 i2c_core 11618 0 snd_page_alloc 4685 2 snd_intel8x0,snd_pcm processor 20861 0 thermal 9266 0 button 3526 0 thermal_sys 8333 2 processor,thermal dragonfly ~ # When I try to load the nvidia driver it just complains: dragonfly ~ # modprobe nvidia FATAL: Error inserting nvidia (/lib/modules/2.6.33-gentoo/video/nvidia.ko): No such device dragonfly ~ # dragonfly ~ # modprobe --show-depends nvidia insmod /lib/modules/2.6.33-gentoo/kernel/drivers/i2c/i2c-core.ko insmod /lib/modules/2.6.33-gentoo/kernel/drivers/char/agp/agpgart.ko insmod /lib/modules/2.6.33-gentoo/video/nvidia.ko NVreg_DeviceFileMode=432 NVreg_DeviceFileUID=0 NVreg_DeviceFileGID=27 NVreg_ModifyDeviceFiles=1 dragonfly ~ # dragonfly ~ # modprobe -v nvidia insmod /lib/modules/2.6.33-gentoo/video/nvidia.ko NVreg_DeviceFileMode=432 NVreg_DeviceFileUID=0 NVreg_DeviceFileGID=27 NVreg_ModifyDeviceFiles=1 FATAL: Error inserting nvidia (/lib/modules/2.6.33-gentoo/video/nvidia.ko): No such device dragonfly ~ # The driver exists: dragonfly ~ # ls -al /lib/modules/2.6.33-gentoo/video/nvidia.ko -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7859091 Mar 1 13:35 /lib/modules/2.6.33-gentoo/video/nvidia.ko dragonfly ~ # I'm not clear what it means by 'no such device'. Is that a message that this driver doesn't support this card? I tried going down to the 96 series drivers but got the same results. Sort of obvious stuff in the kernel config I could think of before sending this email is here: dragonfly ~ # zcat /proc/config.gz | grep AGP CONFIG_AGP=m # CONFIG_AGP_ALI is not set # CONFIG_AGP_ATI is not set # CONFIG_AGP_AMD is not set # CONFIG_AGP_AMD64 is not set CONFIG_AGP_INTEL=m # CONFIG_AGP_NVIDIA is not set # CONFIG_AGP_SIS is not set # CONFIG_AGP_SWORKS is not set # CONFIG_AGP_VIA is not set # CONFIG_AGP_EFFICEON is not set dragonfly ~ # zcat /proc/config.gz | grep NVIDIA # CONFIG_AGP_NVIDIA is not set # CONFIG_FB_NVIDIA is not set dragonfly ~ # zcat /proc/config.gz | grep DRM CONFIG_DRM=m # CONFIG_DRM_TDFX is not set # CONFIG_DRM_R128 is not set # CONFIG_DRM_RADEON is not set # CONFIG_DRM_I810 is not set # CONFIG_DRM_I830 is not set # CONFIG_DRM_I915 is not set # CONFIG_DRM_MGA is not set # CONFIG_DRM_SIS is not set # CONFIG_DRM_VIA is not set # CONFIG_DRM_SAVAGE is not set dragonfly ~ # I assumed the Intel AGP might be usefull since it's an Intel motherboard but it didn't help so I blacklisted it and it's not loaded. Anyone able to spot what must be an obvious mistake? Current xorg.conf file it attached. It was done by hand so it could easily have big problems. I tried running with no xorg.conf file but it didn't work either. hald is running. Thanks, Mark dragonfly ~ # cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf Section "Files" ModulePath "/usr/lib/xorg/modules" FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/misc/" FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/TTF/" FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/OTF" FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/Type1/" FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/100dpi/" FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/75dpi/" EndSection Section "Module" Load "extmod" Load "glx" # Load "dri" EndSection Section "DRI" Mode 0666 EndSection Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Keyboard0" Driver "kbd" EndSection Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Mouse0" Driver "mouse" Option "Protocol" "auto" Option
[gentoo-user] Re: nvidia GeForce 6200 questions
On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 2:04 PM, Mark Knecht wrote: > Hi, > I've been trying to get an nvidia controller working today and not > having much luck. It's complaining about failing to load kernel > module. SOLVED: Mar 1 14:36:49 dragonfly kernel: NVRM: This PCI I/O region assigned to your NVIDIA device is invalid: Mar 1 14:36:49 dragonfly kernel: NVRM: BAR1 is 0M @ 0x0 (PCI:0001:00.0) Mar 1 14:36:49 dragonfly kernel: NVRM: The system BIOS may have misconfigured your GPU. Mar 1 14:36:49 dragonfly kernel: nvidia: probe of :01:00.0 failed with error -1 Mar 1 14:36:49 dragonfly kernel: NVRM: The NVIDIA probe routine failed for 1 device(s). Mar 1 14:36:49 dragonfly kernel: NVRM: None of the NVIDIA graphics adapters were initialized! And indeed it was a BIOS setting. Fixed and working now. Sorry for the noise, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Official document for stabilization policy/guideline
On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 9:41 AM, William Hubbs wrote: > On Tue, Mar 02, 2010 at 09:30:18AM +0100, Justin wrote: >> On 01/03/10 16:39, Lie Ryan wrote: >> > I've found a few people referencing to a "30-day stabilization policy" >> > which basically says a package must be at least 30-days-old to be >> > considered for stabilization, but is there any document that serves as >> > an official guideline/checklist on how to consider to stabilize a >> > package? Is the 30-day policy the only policy? >> > >> > I've been running several ~arch-ed packages that appears to be compile >> > and runs fine on my machine and would like to vote them for >> > stabilization. Is it enough to just open a bug issue and pray that the >> > arch manager would notice? >> > >> > >> You might be interested in those two things too >> >> >> http://phajdan-jr.blogspot.com/2010/03/stabilizing-package-is-serious-thing.html >> >> http://www.mail-archive.com/gentoo-...@lists.gentoo.org/msg36433.html >> > > In a nutshell, anyone can request stabilization of a package. If > something has been in the tree for at least 30 days without issues and > there isn't a stabilization request filed for it already, feel free > to file one. > > William > > In the __very__ old days wasn't there some measure of how many times it's been downloaded? 30 days and 5 downloads vs 30 days and 5000 downloads really might be different in terms of stability. Maybe there never was but it seemed like folks talked about back in about 2000 or so... - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] nvidia GeForce 6200 questions
On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 8:09 AM, Peter Humphrey wrote: > On Monday 01 March 2010 22:47:36 Neil Walker wrote: > >> There was a patch for the 190.53 driver released yesterday to make it >> work with 2.6.33. > > Can you give a link please? I'm having trouble compiling nvidia-drivers > with 2.6.33 and I can't see much on the nvidia site. > > -- > Rgds > Peter. 190.53-r1 is what I'm using. It works fine but so far things like glxgears are very slow. I'll need to look at that, maybe over the weekend. It has no effect that I can see on what my wife does with the machine. But should it effect 2D-ish things like HuluDesktop or Myth? I cannot see it. They seem to work fine. - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Filesystem corruption - reiserfs? - won't boot, "filesystem couldn't be fixed :("
On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 4:24 AM, Stroller wrote: > There seem to have been a few people posting with filesystem corruption in > the last week or two. It seems to be my turn, so I hope it isn't contagious. > The cause here is quite clear - whilst rummaging in the server cupboard > yesterday, power to the machine was accidentally disconnected. > > I have booted with a live CD & run `reiserfsck --fix-fixable` on the > filesystem, but nevertheless when I attempt to boot the system I get a > "failed to open the device... no such file or directory" message, followed > by another error as per subject line. > > However, you will see from this screenshot (taken with an IP KVM) that the > filesystem does indeed seem to have been mounted successfully, if read-only: > > http://linux.stroller.uk.eu.org/fs-corruption.png > > All I did here was log in with the root password. > > > When I boot with a live CD I can mount, read & write the filesystem: > > r...@sysresccd /root % mount -v -L root /mnt/gentoo > mount: you didn't specify a filesystem type for /dev/sda3 > I will try type reiserfs > /dev/sda3 on /mnt/gentoo type reiserfs (rw) > r...@sysresccd /root % ls /mnt/gentoo > bin boot dev etc home lib mnt opt proc root sbin sys tmp usr > var > r...@sysresccd /root % touch /mnt/gentoo/foo > r...@sysresccd /root % echo foobar >> /mnt/gentoo/foo > r...@sysresccd /root % ls -lh !!:$ > ls -lh /mnt/gentoo/foo > -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7 2010-03-03 11:18 /mnt/gentoo/foo > r...@sysresccd /root % cat !!:$ > cat /mnt/gentoo/foo > foobar > r...@sysresccd /root % rm !!:$ > rm /mnt/gentoo/foo > rm: remove regular file `/mnt/gentoo/foo'? y > r...@sysresccd /root % > > All the important system stuff on this PC is on a single partition. I have > two other drives attached at /mnt/space & /mnt/morespace - they are XFS and > I have run xfs_repair on both of them, which completes quickly indicating no > problems. > > I'm not really sure how to proceed next. I feel the problem is indeed on > this reiserfs filesystem, the root filesystem with the label "root". I can't > help thinking that the problem is not that the system "failed to open the > device", but instead maybe that there's an important system file missing > that means the init script (or whatever responsible for mounting the > fiesystem) is not properly returning 0. Does this seem possible? Maybe the > reiserfs handler for mount is somehow broken (performing the mount, but not > returning 0, or perhaps broken in such as was it is able to mount read-only > but not read-write). > > I am tempted to chroot into the system and re-emerge system & baselayout. If > I'm correct in this above guess then re-emerging the correct file will fix > the problem. Right? > > `reiserfsck --help` shows some other options besides the simple > --fix-fixable - I assume the "expert option" of --scan-whole-partition is > unsafe, but what about the --rebuild-sb or --rebuild-tree? Can I safely run > these? Am I advised to run these? > > Stroller. Hi Stroller, Sorry for your problems. I've had a rash of machine problems over the last 6 weeks. No fun. I feel for you. In my most recent case what looked like a simple disk corruption problem was really a prelude to the drive just plain going bad. Have you tried smartctl to see what it says about the drive at this point? It would be even more frustrating to chroot in, do all the work, think you had it fixed and then the underlying foundation of your house crumbles beneath you 3 weeks from now. Good luck, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Filesystem corruption - reiserfs? - won't boot, "filesystem couldn't be fixed :("
On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 6:26 AM, Stroller wrote: > > On 3 Mar 2010, at 14:00, Mark Knecht wrote: >> >> On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 4:24 AM, Stroller >> wrote: >>> >>> There seem to have been a few people posting with filesystem corruption >>> in >>> the last week or two. It seems to be my turn, so I hope it isn't >>> contagious. >>> The cause here is quite clear - whilst rummaging in the server cupboard >>> yesterday, power to the machine was accidentally disconnected. >> >> ... >> Sorry for your problems. I've had a rash of machine problems over >> the last 6 weeks. No fun. I feel for you. >> >> In my most recent case what looked like a simple disk corruption >> problem was really a prelude to the drive just plain going bad. Have >> you tried smartctl to see what it says about the drive at this point? >> >> It would be even more frustrating to chroot in, do all the work, >> think you had it fixed and then the underlying foundation of your >> house crumbles beneath you 3 weeks from now. > > I don't think this is a problem. I would love to know what others think of > the `smartctl` output: > > > r...@sysresccd /root % smartctl -H /dev/sda > smartctl version 5.38 [i486-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen > Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/ > > === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === > SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED > Please note the following marginal Attributes: > ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED > WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE > 9 Power_On_Seconds 0x0012 001 001 020 Old_age Always > FAILING_NOW 44803h+12m+16s > > r...@sysresccd /root % smartctl -i /dev/sda > smartctl version 5.38 [i486-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen > Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/ > > === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === > Model Family: Fujitsu MPA..MPG series > Device Model: FUJITSU MPF3204AT > Serial Number: 05030567 > Firmware Version: 0028 > User Capacity: 20,496,236,544 bytes > Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show] > ATA Version is: 5 > ATA Standard is: ATA/ATAPI-5 T13 1321D revision 1 > Local Time is: Wed Mar 3 14:14:31 2010 UTC > SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. > SMART support is: Enabled > > r...@sysresccd /root % > > > This looks to me like smartctl is going "OMG! What an ancient drive!" - it's > a 20gig EIDE drive and if my pocket calculator is correct (44803/24/365), > it's seen 5 years of active use - and that's the "marginal attribute" > referred to. > > Like I said, the power plug was accidentally pulled on this drive, so I'm > inclined to attribute the corruption only to that, not to the drive actually > failing. > > The drive is in a computer that has rarely been turned off in the last > couple of years, and is also in a warm environment, conditions which are > ideal. I appreciate the latter seems unintuitive, but in fact studies have > showed that drives in somewhat warm environments last longer than those that > are cooled. > > That it passes the "SMART overall-health self-assessment test" suggests to > me that it is chugging away quite happily. > > I would have dismissed your concerns were it not for the capitalised > "FAILING_NOW" in the output. Like I say, I think this is just smartctl > declaring "OMG! this drive is old!", but I open this matter to the list for > discussion (should you wish). > > I think I'm actually nearly ready to migrate off this system. The power was > actually pulled as I installed 3 new (to me) rackmount machines in the > server cupboard - the plan is to have identical machines running RAID, so > that in the case of ANY problems I have spares available. I have take > nightly backups of the important data on this machine, however I'd prefer it > to run just a couple or a few weeks longer to allow me to migrate at my own > leisure. > > Stroller. I've had two machines go bad due to hard drive problems in the last 6 weeks. One drive was 4.5 years old, the other 6 years old. I have no experience with smart. I'm just learning about it. However it is generated by the microcontroller in the hard drive as per the view of the drive manufacturer so if the drive is telling you it's failing then... My 4.5 year failure actually stopped producing smart output somewhere along the way before it failed. The 6 year drive I wasn't using smart at the time so I had no data from it but it was in an environment where the UPS went through a lot of abuse. I sounds like you have good backups so just make sure they are good and do what you want. - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] No more mythtv for Gentoo users?
On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 8:52 AM, Grant Edwards wrote: > When upgrading a machine today, I saw a notice that mythtv 0.21 has > now been hardmasked. I think it's because it depends on an obsolte > version of Qt. Don't get me started on the royal PITA of requiring > that Qt be installed for a backend-only setup on a server. > > Since 0.21 and 0.23 is hardmasked, and mythv 0.22 is unstable on > everything except the amd64 platform, what's an X86 user to do? > > -- > Grant Edwards grant.b.edwards Yow! My face is new, my I think this is being handled badly but that sort of the way it is for a few days anyway. Shortly 0.22 will be unmasked as stable if it isn't already, but there are LOTS and LOTS of things we need to be careful about when changing or the Myth database will get messed up and possibly be unusable. It seems that a few devs can decide that something like qt3 is enough to force people to move forward. I've got 5 x64/amd64 frontends plus a backend PPC server. I'm not convinced they thought about this sort of mixed environment issue but that's the way it is. I am expecting that it's going to be a bad couple of weeks I'd like to find some sort of sunset overlay for 0.21 but I haven't looked. Let me know if you go that way. - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: No more mythtv for Gentoo users?
On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 10:49 AM, Grant Edwards wrote: > On 2010-03-03, Mark Knecht wrote: >> On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 8:52 AM, Grant Edwards >> wrote: >>> When upgrading a machine today, I saw a notice that mythtv 0.21 has >>> now been hardmasked. ??I think it's because it depends on an obsolte >>> version of Qt. ??Don't get me started on the royal PITA of requiring >>> that Qt be installed for a backend-only setup on a server. >>> >>> Since 0.21 and 0.23 is hardmasked, and mythv 0.22 is unstable on >>> everything except the amd64 platform, what's an X86 user to do? > >> I think this is being handled badly but that sort of the way it is for >> a few days anyway. Shortly 0.22 will be unmasked as stable if it isn't >> already, but there are LOTS and LOTS of things we need to be careful >> about when changing or the Myth database will get messed up and >> possibly be unusable. > > I read the instructions for fixing the broken database encoding, but > it appears mine is fine -- so updating to 0.22 won't be quite as > painful as it might have been. I'll still have to re-build the > frontend, since 0.22 doesn't use a compatible protocol. You are already using latin1 throughout your database? You are lucky if that's true. It isn't for me but I've been running myth for about 4 years now. I would suggest that if you use __any__ remote frontends and there is any chance of someone else powering one up and using Myth then you should first emerge -C mythtv on ALL frontend-only machines, upgrade your server, emerge mythtv-0.22 on one frontend, make sure it works, and then move on with any other machine. Good luck and report back how it goes! - Mark > > I'll probably try upgrading to 0.22. > > -- > Grant Edwards grant.b.edwards Yow! We're going to a > at new disco! > gmail.com > > >
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: No more mythtv for Gentoo users?
On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 12:30 PM, Grant Edwards wrote: > On 2010-03-03, Mark Knecht wrote: >> On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 10:49 AM, Grant Edwards >>> >>> I read the instructions for fixing the broken database encoding, but >>> it appears mine is fine -- so updating to 0.22 won't be quite as >>> painful as it might have been. ??I'll still have to re-build the >>> frontend, since 0.22 doesn't use a compatible protocol. >> >> You are already using latin1 throughout your database? > > Apparently: > > $ mysql -umythtv -p mythconverg -e 'status;' > Enter password: > -- > mysql Ver 14.12 Distrib 5.0.84, for pc-linux-gnu (i686) using readline 6.0 > > Connection id: 106 > Current database: mythconverg > Current user: myt...@localhost > SSL: Not in use > Current pager: stdout > Using outfile: '' > Using delimiter: ; > Server version: 5.0.84-log Gentoo Linux mysql-5.0.84-r1 > Protocol version: 10 > Connection: Localhost via UNIX socket > Server characterset: latin1 > Db characterset: latin1 > Client characterset: latin1 > Conn. characterset: latin1 > UNIX socket: /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock > Uptime: 1 day 20 hours 44 min 55 sec > > Threads: 5 Questions: 261810 Slow queries: 0 Opens: 1400 Flush tables: 1 > Open tables: 59 Queries per second avg: 1.625 > -- > Good stuff. Not true for me. > >> You are lucky if that's true. It isn't for me but I've been running >> myth for about 4 years now. > > I've been running Myth for a while (6 years?), but this database was > created about 7 months ago when I switched from a dedicated FE/BE > machine running KnoppMyth to a split FE/BE setup where the BE runs on > a non-dedicated Gentoo machine. Not sure how it ended up this way > other than the fact that I don't have UTF support enabled on that box > (at some point in the past, having UTF support enabled broke something > else, but I don't remember what). > >> I would suggest that if you use __any__ remote frontends and there is >> any chance of someone else powering one up and using Myth then you >> should first emerge -C mythtv on ALL frontend-only machines, > > The FE doesn't run Gentoo, it runs MiniMyth -- I _think_ all I need to > do is replace the 0.21 rootfs on the USB flash drive with the one > containing 0.22... You've probably read this elsewhere but apparently an older 0.21 frontend can corrupt the MythTV database. Maybe it won't happen for you if you're already using all latin1 everywhere. I'm not so I have to be careful. Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] xfce4 tray icon problems
On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 5:42 PM, Grant wrote: I'm having a problem with xfce4 tray icons all of a sudden. The wicd-client icon won't show up, even though the binary executes in a terminal without error. I've tried restarting wicd and rebooting. The twinkle icon shows up in the center of the screen instead of the tray, and it has its own panel button which is separate from the main app's panel button. Does anyone know what could be wrong? >>> >>> I didn't understand very well what happen with you, possible because my >>> bad english vocabulary, but have you tried run wicd-client with --no-tray >>> parameter ? >>> >> Another guess, when I upgraded to xfce 4.6 it was necessarily emerge >> x11-themes/tango-icon-theme and set xfce to use it. This package fixed every >> icon problemthat I had in xfce menu. > > I'm sorry, I just saw your post now for some reason. I don't think > the problem is with tango-icon-theme because I have 2 identical > laptops with very similar configurations and neither of them have that > package installed. Only 1 of the laptops is having this problem. > > The problem is with system tray icons that are not panel plugins. For > example: wicd, twinkle, blueman, orage. The icons for those do not > appear at all except for the twinkle icon which appears right in the > center of the screen. All other icons work fine, and system tray > icons that are panel plugins such as xfce4-mixer and clipman work > fine. > > Any ideas? > > - Grant > > Please feel to contribute data and ideas here if appropriate: http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=307685 It doesn't sound exactly like what I've seen but it's very similar. - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] xfce4 tray icon problems
On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 8:23 PM, Grant wrote: > > Thanks Mark. I really think this is a different issue. I emerged > tango-icon-theme with no change. I have all icons except those that > should be in the system tray, and even those missing system tray icons > do appear in the xfce4 menu. There are no blank placeholders or > anything like that. They just don't show up in the system tray at > all. > > I did notice this from Twinkle: > > X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3 > > I researched it on Google but got nowhere. > > - Grant Yeah, it's different unfortunately. I'm curious as to whether you see this with a new user account on the failing machine? Possibly it's something left over in the .config/xfce directory saved from earlier days that's causing you problems? New user, new directory, simple test. - Mark
[gentoo-user] Best file system type for running vmware images?
Hi, I'm wondering if anyone has opinions (on this list? Right...) as to the best file system type for running vmware images of Windows XP. As best I can tell an 8GB C: drive shows up as 4x 2GB files and 1.5GB DRAM is modeled in a file of its own: firefly Mark-XP1 # ls -la total 9291380 drwxr-xr-x 5 mark users 4096 Mar 8 06:05 . drwxr-xr-t 4 mark users 4096 Mar 7 15:53 .. -rw--- 1 mark mark 1593835520 Mar 8 09:41 564daa93-5e87-f134-7796-e68c82de64ee.vmem drwxrwxrwx 2 mark mark4096 Mar 8 06:05 564daa93-5e87-f134-7796-e68c82de64ee.vmem.lck -rw--- 1 mark users 2147221504 Mar 8 09:41 Mark-XP1-f001.vmdk -rw--- 1 mark users 2147221504 Mar 8 09:41 Mark-XP1-f002.vmdk -rw--- 1 mark users 2147221504 Mar 8 09:26 Mark-XP1-f003.vmdk -rw--- 1 mark users 2147221504 Mar 8 09:41 Mark-XP1-f004.vmdk -rw--- 1 mark users1048576 Feb 5 09:30 Mark-XP1-f005.vmdk -rw--- 1 mark users526 Mar 8 06:06 Mark-XP1.vmdk drwxrwxrwx 2 mark mark4096 Mar 8 06:05 Mark-XP1.vmdk.lck -rw--- 1 mark users 0 Feb 5 09:28 Mark-XP1.vmsd -rwxr-xr-x 1 mark users 1398 Mar 8 06:05 Mark-XP1.vmx drwxrwxrwx 2 mark mark4096 Mar 8 06:04 Mark-XP1.vmx.lck -rw--- 1 mark users263 Feb 5 09:27 Mark-XP1.vmxf -rw--- 1 mark users 8684 Mar 8 06:05 nvram -rw-r--r-- 1 mark mark 105208 Mar 8 05:38 vmware-0.log -rw-r--r-- 1 mark mark 106644 Mar 7 16:26 vmware-1.log -rw-r--r-- 1 mark mark 105163 Mar 7 13:55 vmware-2.log -rw-r--r-- 1 mark mark 103535 Mar 8 08:40 vmware.log firefly Mark-XP1 # I suppose that as Windows is operating within this image Windows thinks it is reading or writing to what it considers a file but vmware gets in the middle to somehow map where a small file is within this larger 2GB entity. My usage model is heavily read dominated. I write stock data into a file once and then read it hundreds of times to do work. I'm investigating RAID striping to increase read speed but no matter what the files appear to always be 2GB so I suspect XFS, Reiser or something other than ext3 that I'm currently using would possibly make a difference? But would it be a big difference? How would I test it? I.e. - not that XFS is or isn't a good file system but that it actually helps with vmware operation? My current system is AMD64, 4GB DRAM, i5 Core which is 4 processor threads. Target machine is AMD64, i7 Core or possibly dual XEON, 16GB, 4-6 monitors and multiple 1TB+ drives in some sort of RAID mainly for speed, and then additionally an external RAID for backup. Any ideas warmly appreciated. Thanks, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Multiple Update Issues - what order should things be done?
On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 10:25 AM, Tanstaafl wrote: > On 2010-03-08 8:05 AM, Alan McKinnon wrote: >> It feels like baselayout-2 and openrc have been in ~arch for a year >> or more, so there's no telling when it will move to stable. I haven't >> seen any indication from the dev either. In other words, only that >> dev knows what his plans are. > > As always... ;) thanks... > > Almost forgot - are there any substantive advantages to moving to it, > other than just getting it done now so you don't have to do it later? > > -- > > Charles > > I've been looking at it myself. I think it boots faster if you shut your machines down at night. Other than that I think it's mostly an under-the-hood sort of thing. I'm a user-type also and thinking of building a big, expensive number cruncher so I was looking at it from the perspective of starting off with baselayout-2 just so I wouldn't have to do it later. - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Only two people in the gentoo world is having this problem?
On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 12:28 AM, Damian wrote: > While ago I reported a bug regarding gvfs: > https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=302196 > > It's been unresolved for quite a long time now, so I was wondering if > somebody could give me a hint on how to solve this problem. > > Best, > Damian. > > ?? revdep-rebuild -ip ?? - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Only two people in the gentoo world is having this problem?
On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 6:05 AM, Damian wrote: > On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 2:02 PM, Mark Knecht wrote: >> On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 12:28 AM, Damian wrote: >>> While ago I reported a bug regarding gvfs: >>> https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=302196 >>> >>> It's been unresolved for quite a long time now, so I was wondering if >>> somebody could give me a hint on how to solve this problem. >>> >>> Best, >>> Damian. >>> >>> >> >> ?? >> >> revdep-rebuild -ip > I already tried (reconcilio actually), and didn't solve the problem: > it tries to rebuild gvfs, failing miserably again. > I saw that in the bug report. If you want to keep going down the path of what didn't work then do nothing. Potentially revdep-rebuild finds something else. You need to post some results. I've seen gvfs fail due to flag settings. How would anyone here make a reasoned response with so little data? It's up to you. - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Only two people in the gentoo world is having this problem?
On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 6:25 AM, Damian wrote: > On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 3:10 PM, Mark Knecht wrote: >> On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 6:05 AM, Damian wrote: >>> On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 2:02 PM, Mark Knecht wrote: >>>> On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 12:28 AM, Damian wrote: >>>>> While ago I reported a bug regarding gvfs: >>>>> https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=302196 >>>>> >>>>> It's been unresolved for quite a long time now, so I was wondering if >>>>> somebody could give me a hint on how to solve this problem. >>>>> >>>>> Best, >>>>> Damian. >>>>> >>>>> >>>> >>>> ?? >>>> >>>> revdep-rebuild -ip >>> I already tried (reconcilio actually), and didn't solve the problem: >>> it tries to rebuild gvfs, failing miserably again. >>> >> >> I saw that in the bug report. If you want to keep going down the path >> of what didn't work then do nothing. Potentially revdep-rebuild finds >> something else. >> >> You need to post some results. I've seen gvfs fail due to flag >> settings. How would anyone here make a reasoned response with so >> little data? > Actually the flag plays no role. Since I compiled the package again > with the original flags and I got the same results. I honestly don't > know which (other) relevant data I can provide. > > I didn't intend to make anybody upset with my email, or with the > mention to the word paludis. > > I'm sorry. I didn't mean to suggest I was upset or anything like that. It's just that sometimes different tools tell you different things. Additionally you are not posting anything much in this thread yet and assume folks will go read the bug post. It's not your fault but I got a certificate error when following your link so I didn't do that. OK, that said let's look at basics. 1) What profile are you using? (eselect profile list) 2) USE flags from make.conf 3) Current results of emerge -pvDuN @world (assuming portage 2.2 or higher...) 4) results of revdep-rebuild -ip I don't know what else to suggest at this point. I've got the stable version emerged. I haven't had any problems myself but Gentoo is always a bit different from user to user. - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Only two people in the gentoo world is having this problem?
On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 7:03 AM, Damian wrote: > On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 9:58 PM, Arttu V. wrote: >> On 3/10/10, Damian wrote: >>> While ago I reported a bug regarding gvfs: >>> https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=302196 >>> >>> It's been unresolved for quite a long time now, so I was wondering if >>> somebody could give me a hint on how to solve this problem. >> >> Are you still using lzma-utils, or have you moved on to xz-utils? > I'm using app-arch/xz-utils. > >> Which package owns your /usr/lib64/liblzmadec.*? (equery belongs >> foofile on Gentoo, dunno what is the equivalent on paludis) > Acording to the output of `paludis --owner /usr/lib64/liblzmadec.la` > no package is the owner. I'm really lost right now... > > This happens when an ebuild doesn't remove packages as well as it installs them. revdep-rebuild should be telling you that the machine is clean except there are these extra files like /usr/lib64/liblzmadec.la. equery belongs /usr/lib64/liblzmadec.la tells you nothing owns it which means the original package isn't on the system anymore. Since we think /usr/lib64/liblzmadec.la comes from lzma-utils we would use equiery files lzma-utils to determine whether this package provides it. I cannot do that as I don't have lzma-utils on my systems anymore. If you don't have lzma-utils on your system anymore then erase /usr/lib64/liblzmadec.la by hand and run revdep-rebuild -ip again and see if it's clean. Hope this helps, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Only two people in the gentoo world is having this problem?
On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 1:39 PM, Arttu V. wrote: > On 3/11/10, Mark Knecht wrote: >> to determine whether this package provides it. I cannot do that as I >> don't have lzma-utils on my systems anymore. > > Well, that can be sort of done with, e.g.: > > ebuild /usr/portage/app-arch/lzma-utils/lzma-utils-4.32.7.ebuild install > > It will run emerge phases until the system creates the installation > image, but it won't merge the files into their proper locations in the > file system. Listing files in the image directory shows all the five > liblzmadec.* files (or symlinks) that would get installed. > >> If you don't have lzma-utils on your system anymore then erase >> /usr/lib64/liblzmadec.la by hand and run revdep-rebuild -ip again and >> see if it's clean. > > Yes, this whole issue smells like an overblown orphaned .la-file > issue. Package manager cannot help much with such, and IMHO it's not a > bug (well maybe in the package manager, but let's not start that > flamewar ;) ). > > Anyway, if it were me I'd nuke the file in a heartbeat, but if OP is > too timid for that, he can also quarantine the file first, i.e., move > it to some other path where it won't cause trouble (and then delete > later). Also, (from the bug) his libarchive.la seems to still list the > .la, so he should re-emerge libarchive after moving away the orphaned > .la-file (or use lafilefixer?). > > Still, there is something funny with paludis, as so many people using > it seem to have so many problems with orphaned libtool archive files. > Ahem, even the warning from exherbo front page is gone nowadays. Is it > production quality now? o.O > > -- > Arttu V. Hi Arttu, I agree with pretty much everything you say although I don't know anything about plaudis so nothing at all to say about that. I think the OP could also do equery depends /usr/lib64/liblzmadec.la and if that shows nothing is depending on it then it's certainly an orphaned file and can be deleted. (Or safely moved...) I went through a period maybe 3-6 months ago where it seems I had a dozen of these orphaned files on all my systems. I cleaned them up, ran emerge -DuN world revdep-rebuild -i eix-test-obsolete -d and have been very clean since. Anyway, I do think it's a really big deal. He'll work his way through it. Cheers, Mark
[gentoo-user] New openssh install message?
Hi, I don't remember seeing this message on previous openssh updates: >>> Installing (1 of 1) net-misc/openssh-5.3_p1-r1 * >>> SetUID: [chmod go-r] /usr/lib64/misc/ssh-keysign ... [ ok ] * Remember to merge your config files in /etc/ssh/ and then * reload sshd: '/etc/init.d/sshd reload'. Is this a new message or have I just missed in the past? I don't know anywhere else for ssh configuration files to exist except /etc/ssh and I normally just do /etc/init.d/sshd restart anytime it gets updated. Has anything changed about this? I'm updating a remote machine and don't want to lose connectivity. Thanks, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: New openssh install message?
On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 11:16 AM, Nikos Chantziaras wrote: > On 03/12/2010 09:07 PM, Mark Knecht wrote: >> >> Hi, >> I don't remember seeing this message on previous openssh updates: >> >>>>> Installing (1 of 1) net-misc/openssh-5.3_p1-r1 >> >> *>>> SetUID: [chmod go-r] /usr/lib64/misc/ssh-keysign ... >> [ ok ] >> * Remember to merge your config files in /etc/ssh/ and then >> * reload sshd: '/etc/init.d/sshd reload'. >> >> Is this a new message or have I just missed in the past? I don't >> know anywhere else for ssh configuration files to exist except >> /etc/ssh and I normally just do >> >> /etc/init.d/sshd restart >> >> anytime it gets updated. >> >> Has anything changed about this? I'm updating a remote machine and >> don't want to lose connectivity. > > Probably what the writer of that message meant is to update the config files > with dispatch-conf and the like. I don't know to what else "merge" could > refer. Thanks. OK, so I did a restart and I can still ssh in so things seem OK. Sometimes the international as[ect of Linux add extra confusion. I'm sure it's perfectly clear to someone. Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: New openssh install message?
On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 3:02 PM, Neil Bothwick wrote: > On Fri, 12 Mar 2010 11:23:16 -0800, Mark Knecht wrote: > >> >> Has anything changed about this? I'm updating a remote machine and >> >> don't want to lose connectivity. >> > >> > Probably what the writer of that message meant is to update the >> > config files with dispatch-conf and the like. I don't know to what >> > else "merge" could refer. >> >> Thanks. OK, so I did a restart and I can still ssh in so things seem OK. > > With a remote machine, I always restart SSH, leave the current shell open > and open a new one from another terminal. The old session will continue > to work when you shut down sshd, so if the new install is somehow broken, > you still have the access you need to fix it. > Thanks Neil. That's exactly what I did, additionally logging in as a different user that wasn't present before the restart. Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] [HELP] Intermittent software RAID failures
On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 2:45 PM, Carlos Hendson wrote: > Hello, > > I've got a Dell Inspiron 1720 laptop with dual 2.5" hard drives setup > using software RAID1. I've had this computer for about a year and half > and all's been working well. > > I've experienced intermittent software RAID errors like those found in > the "softraid-fail.txt" attachment. > > Initially I suspected a kernel bug because it started around the same > time I'd upgraded the kernel (around the 2.6.30 upgrade) but subsequent > kernel upgrades haven't improved the situation. > > I've run smartctl --all and bablocks on both disks, but nothing is > reported as faulty. > > I don't understand what is causing RAID to report these faults and would > like some ideas as to how I can further diagnose the problem. > > Thanks in advance, > Carlos > Kernel upgrades might not tell you much. Kernel downgrades might. - Mark
[gentoo-user] RAID/LVM machine - install questions
Hi, I'm starting to put together a server-type machine with multiple purposes: 1) MythTV server 2) General backups for another fast machine I'm going to build 3) Wife's new desktop Since all of these requirements are pretty modest but I want high reliability I'd like to do software RAID with (I think) LVM on top of that. I've not decided yet exactly what RAID type to use, and I know nothing about LVM, so I'm reading here to learn: http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/LVM http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/lvm2.xml The LVM Install doc is pretty clear about not putting these in LVM: /etc, /lib, /mnt, /proc, /sbin, /dev, and /root which seems sensible. From an install point of view I'm wondering about RAID and how I should treat /, /boot and swap? As I'm planning on software RAID it seems that maybe those part of the file system should not even be part of RAID. Is that sensible? I always want / available to mount the directories above. /boot on RAID means (I guess) that I'd need RAID in the kernel instead of modular, and why do I need swap on RAID? The most important task of this machine is to keep data safe. If the machine has a hardware problem and is down for a day or two that's not going to be a big problem as long as the Myth recordings, my wife's home directory and the backups I'm doing and placing on the machine are relatively safe. the processor is going to be WAY overkill with 8 cores but it hardly makes financial sense to go smaller as maybe I can even run some computer cycles on it, like building binary packages for my other machines or something like that. Interested in whatever thoughts folks have about the best way to set this up. If I haven't outlined the requirements well enough let me know. I'm at least a week from starting to build the hardware so there's no rush on this but maybe comments will effect motherboard selection, etc. Thanks, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] RAID/LVM machine - install questions
On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 9:38 AM, KH wrote: > Mark Knecht schrieb: >> >> Hi, > > [...] >> >> 3) Wife's new desktop > > [...] >> >> I want high reliability > > [...] >> >> The most important task of this machine is to keep data safe. > > [...] >> >> Thanks, >> Mark >> > > Hi Mark, > > For me it sounds like those points just don't fit together ;-) > > Regards > kh > > :-) Yeah.. Well, keeping my wife's data safe keeps me happy. :-) So the chassis and drives for this 1st machine are on order. 6 1TB green drives. Now I just need to decide what sort of RAID to use. I don't need much speed writing so I'm thinking maybe a 3 drive RAID1 setup with a hot spare managed using mdadm and then LVM on top of it. The main backup data will be coming from another machine I'm building that runs a new i7 980x 12 core processor with 24GB of DRAM. That machine will run 5 copies of VirtualBox/Windows 7 using 2 cores + 4GB DRAM for each, leaving 2 cores and 4GB for Gentoo as the host OS. Each Windows instance crunches numbers 24/7 and needs to be backed up once a day with each backup being about 20GB. I'll move approximately 100GB across the network each night to the 1st machine at least once a day, possibly more. This data needs to be very safe so once every week it goes offsite also. Other than that the 1st machine will also be a MythTV backend server. That's a pretty light load hardware wise but uses a little computing muscle to do commercial detection and the like. And then yes, my wife can use it as her main desktop as most of the above work takes place overnight with Myth being in the evening and backups of machine #1 occurring at 4AM, etc. - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] RAID/LVM machine - install questions
On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 6:22 AM, Florian Philipp wrote: > Am 19.03.2010 23:40, schrieb Mark Knecht: > [...] >> >> The LVM Install doc is pretty clear about not putting these in LVM: >> >> /etc, /lib, /mnt, /proc, /sbin, /dev, and /root >> > > /boot shouldn't be there, either. Not sure about /bin > >> which seems sensible. From an install point of view I'm wondering >> about RAID and how I should treat /, /boot and swap? As I'm planning >> on software RAID it seems that maybe those part of the file system >> should not even be part of RAID. Is that sensible? I always want / >> available to mount the directories above. /boot on RAID means (I >> guess) that I'd need RAID in the kernel instead of modular, and why do >> I need swap on RAID? >>[...] > > If you use kernel based software RAID (mdadm, not dmraid), you can put > everything except of /boot on RAID. Even for /boot, there are > workarounds. I think there was a thread about it very recently right on > this list. I'm thinking I'll keep it as simple as possibly and just spread out the Gentoo install over the multiple hard drives without using RAID, but maybe not. It would be nice to have everything on RAID but I don't know if I should byte that off for my first taste of building RAID. > > If you don't want to use an initrd (and believe me, you don't), you > cannot build the RAID components as modules, of course. But why would > you want? You need it anyway all the time between bootup and shutdown. No initrd. I've never used it in 10 years of running Linux and I wouldn't know how to start or even why I would use it. I suppose if I had hardware RAID then maybe I'd need to but that's not my plan. > > You don't need to put swap on a RAID. Swap has its own system for > implementing RAID-1 or RAID-0-like functionality. Using a RAID-1 for it > prevents the machine from crashing if the disk on which swap resides > dies. RAID-0 would be faster, of course. > > I personally find it easier to put swap on LVM in order to make > management easier. However, if you want to use suspend-to-disk (a.k.a. > hibernate), you would need an initrd, again. > > Alternatively, you can also use LVM for mirroring (RAID-1) or striping > (RAID-0) single volumes. I think this only makes sense if you just want > to protect some single volumes. After using it for some time, I found it > not worth the effort. With current disk prices, just mirror everything > and live easy ;-) > > Hope this helps, > Florian Philipp > > Very helpful. Thanks! Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] broken files left and revdep-rebuild
On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 12:15 PM, KH wrote: > Hi, > > I just ran revdep-rebuild -i -- --ask. At the end there was: > > * Found some broken files that weren't associated with known packages > * The broken files are: > * /usr/bin/imgcmp > * /usr/bin/imginfo > * /usr/bin/jasper > * /usr/lib/libjasper-1.701.so.1.0.0 > > > Does somebody know where those files came from? I tend to remove them. Will > this break the system? > > Regards > kh > > I use something like equery belong /usr/bin/imgcmp and if nothing owns them then I remove them by hand, one by one. It's just kruft left over. After I'm all done with that then I run emerge -pvDuN @world and revdep-rebuild -ip again to ensure everything's cool. - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] RAID/LVM machine - install questions
On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 8:51 AM, Paul Hartman wrote: > On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 7:12 AM, KH wrote: >> Am 20.03.2010 19:26, schrieb Mark Knecht: >> [...] >>> >>> So the chassis and drives for this 1st machine are on order. 6 1TB >>> green drives. [] >>> - Mark >>> >> >> Hi Mark, >> >> What do you mean by "green drives"? I had been told - but never searched for >> confirmation - that those energy saving drives change spinning and also do >> spin down. The problem would be that the drives than might drop out of the >> raid since they are not reachable fast. >> >> Don't know if that is true. I bought me some black label drives for the >> longer warranty. > > If it is a WD drive, google "TLER" for info about possible problems in RAID > use. > > Yeah, those issues do get discussed at times on the Linux RAID list. I've asked questions about it and been told that Linux software RAID depends totally on what the driver tells it and nothing seems to be don (as best I can tell) based on any fixed time. That's more of a hardware controller issue. I was told that if the drive by itself doesn't fail at the system level when it's spinning up, then it won't fail at the RAID level either. However what it does if it has a hardware error is a bit beyond me at this point. My intention is to try and get better with smartd so that the drive is continually monitored and see if I can get ahead of a failure with that.
[gentoo-user] Blacklist firewire?
I'm trying to blacklist firewire-ohci and firewire-core but I'm doing something wrong. I added then to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist, ran update-modules and then rebooted but they continue to load. What am I doing wrong? blacklist eth1394 blacklist firewire-ochi blacklist firewire-core keeper ~ # lsmod Module Size Used by ipv6 207757 30 nvidia 10611606 22 snd_hda_codec_realtek 239530 1 uhci_hcd 18047 0 ehci_hcd 30854 0 snd_hda_intel 17688 0 snd_hda_codec 45755 2 snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel snd_pcm58104 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec snd_timer 15030 1 snd_pcm rtc_cmos7678 0 snd37476 5 snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_pcm,snd_timer rtc_core 11093 1 rtc_cmos usbcore 115023 3 uhci_hcd,ehci_hcd sg 23029 0 agpgart24341 1 nvidia processor 23121 0 rtc_lib 1617 1 rtc_core e1000e111701 0 soundcore800 1 snd firewire_ohci 20022 0 snd_page_alloc 5809 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm firewire_core 36109 1 firewire_ohci thermal11650 0 keeper ~ # Thanks, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Blacklist firewire?
On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 10:01 AM, Paul Hartman wrote: > On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 7:33 PM, Mark Knecht wrote: >> I'm trying to blacklist firewire-ohci and firewire-core but I'm doing >> something wrong. >> >> I added then to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist, ran update-modules and then >> rebooted but they continue to load. What am I doing wrong? > > (Keep in mind that is based on me running ~amd64 and whatever versions > of openrc/baselayound/module-init-tools that entails.) > > Rename it to blacklist.conf and other files in that directory that > don't end in .conf should also be renamed. If you have > /etc/modprobe.conf it can be deleted (but be sure the contents of that > file are handled by the files in /etc/modprobe.d/). I don't think > running update-modules is even necessary anymore. > My bad in writing the original post. It's already named blacklist.conf keeper ~ # ls /etc/modprobe.d/ aliases.conf alsa.conf blacklist.conf i386.conf nvidia.conf pnp-aliases.conf keeper ~ # and the firewire stuff is in the blacklist.conf file: keeper ~ # cat /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf | grep firewire blacklist firewire-ochi blacklist firewire-core keeper ~ # I don't have a modprobe.conf file: keeper ~ # ls -al /etc/modprobe.conf ls: cannot access /etc/modprobe.conf: No such file or directory keeper ~ # and the modules continue to be loaded: keeper ~ # lsmod | grep firewire firewire_ohci 20022 0 firewire_core 36109 1 firewire_ohci keeper ~ # This is a new machine built with a March Gentoo install image so hopefully it's all basically correct from the outset but the modules are still getting loaded. Thanks! Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Duplicate identical Hard Disk
On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 4:02 PM, Paul Hartman wrote: > On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 5:48 PM, Joseph wrote: >> I have two identical HD in the box and want to duplicate sda to sdb; >> sdb is not even partitioned. >> I think I could do: >> dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb >> but I need to boot from CD isn't it? > > Yes, basically, boot from USB or CD and use ddrescue to clone it, then > edit your fstab and I think you should be good. > > RAID1 would help if a drive physically dies, but if you had any > filesystem corruption or anything you'd just have an identically > corrupt copy on the second disk. A big part of my struggles over the last few days has been with mdadm & RAID1. I'm learning that we don't want to send someone down that path unless he has the right sort of disks. I'm having to deal with returns and reordering due to this. People should be aware of what is really required to do RAID before they get started so they don't duplicate my trials. I wasn't and I'm paying for it. (Almost literally if I don't get the drives in the mail!) ;-) Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Duplicate identical Hard Disk
On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 6:40 PM, Joseph wrote: > On 04/01/10 17:43, Mark Knecht wrote: >> >> On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 4:02 PM, Paul Hartman >> wrote: >>> >>> On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 5:48 PM, Joseph wrote: >>>> >>>> I have two identical HD in the box and want to duplicate sda to sdb; >>>> sdb is not even partitioned. >>>> I think I could do: >>>> dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb >>>> but I need to boot from CD isn't it? >>> >>> Yes, basically, boot from USB or CD and use ddrescue to clone it, then >>> edit your fstab and I think you should be good. >>> >>> RAID1 would help if a drive physically dies, but if you had any >>> filesystem corruption or anything you'd just have an identically >>> corrupt copy on the second disk. >> >> A big part of my struggles over the last few days has been with mdadm >> & RAID1. I'm learning that we don't want to send someone down that >> path unless he has the right sort of disks. I'm having to deal with >> returns and reordering due to this. >> >> People should be aware of what is really required to do RAID before >> they get started so they don't duplicate my trials. I wasn't and I'm >> paying for it. (Almost literally if I don't get the drives in the >> mail!) ;-) >> >> Cheers, >> Mark > > So what you are folks saying is to stay away from RAID-1, beside as Paul > mention if I get any corruption and/or configuration (due to ebuild) with > RAID I'll be screwed anyhow. > So my best option is bootable CD and: > dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb > > But I'm kind of confused as to how to edit the "sdb" second drive. > I know I'll have to edit at lest: grub.conf and fstab > But how? > > 1.) Both disk are bootable, (have a boot sector) if I disconnect first one > sda, I think the second one will be recognize automatically as "sda" isn't > it? > 2.) If configure second drive after copying as "sdb" will it still boot if > fist disk is disconnected? > -- > Joseph > > With only 2 disks I personally think you're on the right path. With 3 disks I'm personally planning on RAID1 using 3 copies. If you disconnect the first disk (current sda) then most likely the original second disk (old sdb) becomes the new first disk. (sda) In that case no edits are required. However if you make them both bootable then assuming your BIOS supports it you can tell it to boot from the second disk. If you want the second disk booting to use the second disk's copy of Gentoo then you need to edit things to use sdb, not sda. that's probably overly complicated for what you are trying to do. I say make the copy, then disconnect the first drive physically and give it a try. This all presumes that you comtinue down this path with by hand copies. My comment about RAID was that I am learning the hard (alas expensive) way that not all disks can actually do RAID, at least not Linux software RAID, and really be usable. Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Duplicate identical Hard Disk
On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 5:02 AM, Dan Cowsill wrote: > On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 10:09 PM, Mark Knecht wrote: >> >> With only 2 disks I personally think you're on the right path. With 3 >> disks I'm personally planning on RAID1 using 3 copies. >> ... >> My comment about RAID was that I am learning the hard (alas expensive) >> way that not all disks can actually do RAID, at least not Linux >> software RAID, and really be usable. >> >> > > From what I understand of software RAID in linux, it works on block > devices, not disks. This means if some endeavoring soul was brave > enough to RAID even partitions on a device, it would work as normal. > Perhaps you mean that not all properly functioning disks can do RAID? > What sort of trouble are you running into? > > I've successfully deployed both RAID1 and RAID5 on my home media > server for quite some time now. While the initial time investment in > reading documentation was considerable, since that time I've had no > cause for trouble. I keep smartmontools looking at the array member > disks and regularly read through monthly smart reports of my drives. > > Also, if you have three disks, why not go for RAID5? It is much > quicker and I believe you'll end up with more space. It is a bit of a > pain to get mdadm to convert your RAID1 to a RAID5, but it is doable. > > DC Good questions: 1) Yes, you can RAID partitions of drives. That's what I'm doing. You can look at the Gentoo RAID/LVM Install guide to see an example of using RAID0 and RAID1 on a single drive. http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86+raid+lvm2-quickinstall.xml 2) I'm certainly not suggesting RAID doesn't work. It's just not working for me, either due to new motherboard hardware or due to the drives themselves. I'm currently betting it's the drives. The background info, without getting too deeply into it, is that if the drive supports SMART and SMART is enabled, then when doing RAID you need guaranteed Time Limited Error Recovery (TLER) to ensure (I think) that SMART works doesn't get in the way of the drive responding in the appropriate amount of time or else the drive will fall out of the RAID array. Turns out the WD (according to different mailing list and forums I've been looking at) has removed TLER on almost all of their Green drive and some/many/most of the Blue and Black series. They are supporting this in the RE drives though of which I've obtained two. They are smaller and more expensive, but built for RAID, so I'm going to try them out next. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Limited_Error_Recovery 3) As I understand the subject you are correct about size and speed, but a 3-disk RAID5 array can stand 1 disk failing whereas a 3-disk RAID1 array can stand 2 disks failing. For this app (MythTV and seldom used backup server) I don't need speed and size isn't a huge issue so I chose 3-disk RAID1. (Note that the HTPC case I'm using supports up to 3 drives only.) Because multiple drives purchased at the same time generally come from the same production lot there's an additional danger that if one drive fails then one more (or all) could fail at the same time so I'm protecting myself against that. Again, this is very specific to my current needs which is really to back up another machine which will be RAID0 as it needs more disk I/O speed to support 12 processor cores. As always, I'm certainly interested in info and ideas on this subject, most especially now when I'm buying and building. Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 10:47 AM, wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I googled down some - often fairly outdated - texts about "the
> best filesystem" fpr a Linux box. Other texts focussed on
> uses, which do not aplly to me: Fileservers, webservers, database
> machines etc.
>
> Wnat I want is a fast and stable (!) filesystem for a desktop PC
> with one 1TByte harddisk. Since using Gentoo and a lot of sources
> I do compile very often "bigger things" (blender-2.50 for example).
> Another thing: Due to my experimenting it is possible that I have to
> reboot "hard", which means, the filesystem will be unmounted not
> cleanly ("dirty" do to say...;) The choosen filesystem should be
> good in recovering such thing.
>
> I am currently using a vanilla 2.6.32.10 kernel.
>
> The question, what remains is: What choose should I make?
>
> I thank you very much in advance for any help!
> Best regards,
> mcc
>
This doesn't address why you would choose one over another but it was
a recent view of Reiser4 vs a couple of others.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=reiser4_benchmarks&num=1
I'm way behind. I haven't even tried ext4 yet!
Good luck,
Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Duplicate identical Hard Disk
On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 9:37 AM, walt wrote: > On 04/02/2010 07:59 AM, Mark Knecht wrote: > >> >> 1) Yes, you can RAID partitions of drives. That's what I'm doing. You >> can look at the Gentoo RAID/LVM Install guide to see an example of >> using RAID0 and RAID1 on a single drive. >> >> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86+raid+lvm2-quickinstall.xml > > Very useful post, thanks. I'm just nitpicking here about the use of > RAID0 on a single physical drive, which doesn't seem useful IIUC. > > RAID0 alternates stripes between two physical drives so that one disk > can be reading/writing while the other disk's heads are seeking, no? > > If that is the case, then single-disk RAID0 will just be thrashing the > heads back and forth between stripes on different partitions, making > more work for itself than necessary. > > If I'm wrong about this, someone please correct me. No, you are correct, RAID0 on a single drive makes no sense. If I suggested that then I apologize for the confusion. I was only saying that you can do RAID on one partition but do non-RAID on another. For instance, /boot is non-RAID and then other partitions are RAID. I may be wrong but I think that's only possible with software RAID. Not sure you could do this behind a hardware RAID controller. sda1 = /boot - non-RAID sda2, sdb2, sdc2 = swap, but not RAID. The kernel binds them. sda3, sdb3, sdc3 = RAID /home or something like that. In case even that's not clear, I don't think mdadm supports a RAID array of any type with all the partitions on a single drive. For instance: mdadm --create /dev/md1 --level=1 --raid-devices=3 /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2 /dev/sda3 doesn't make any sense to me even if it is supported. Hope that helps clear things up. ;-) - Mark
