The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

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Antigravitas: Dec 8, 2019; Die Rettung fuer die Landwirte:

xtal posted:

The PI I'm using uses aarch64, so is it time for me to learn about zfs?

I'd implore you to not boot from ZFS unless you are running FreeBSD. Relying on an out-of-tree module to be able to mount the root file system is unreliable.

ZFS as a data pool is heavenly to manage, but keep in mind that ZFS relies on the underlying devices not lying to it. USB attached devices tend to be liars.

# ? May 28, 2020 08:02

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# ? Apr 19, 2024 22:57

BlankSystemDaemon: Mar 13, 2009

Oh right, Linux doesn't have boot environments, good root on zpool support, or any of the other nice things that both FreeBSD and Solaris has. orz

# ? May 28, 2020 09:32

ewe2: Jul 1, 2009

ZFS is dead on Solaris and not as active in development on FreeBSD as it is on Linux. The problem isn't the code or the will to develop, it is partly because you can't just shoehorn ZFS into Linux and expect it to work the way it did in OmniOS or whatever remnant of Solaris you used, and partly because it can't live in the kernel because Oracle isn't going to give it up. It will live in userland limbo for who knows how long, but it's quite usable as a storage filesystem. I would like to see something ZFS-like in Linux, I liked the abstractions, but it did have its limitations which may no longer matter now in the age of SSDs.

# ? May 28, 2020 12:07

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

Tad Naff posted:

Hi, I have been informed that I am, contrary to my previous belief, in fact responsible for keeping a Gentoo server up to date. I inherited it from a now-retired guy a couple of years ago and was under the impression that contractors were taking care of it. It's the only Gentoo VM I'm aware of in the whole organization, and I have zero Gentoo knowledge.

So Googling, I try various forms of 'emerge' and I keep hitting against this "EAPI 6" stuff and it tells me to upgrade portage, but I can't do that because some python dependency won't install because of EAPI 6. Ring any bells? The "solutions" I'm finding so far don't work.

I'd just copy the actual code over to some other Debian or Red Hat VM and see if I can get it to run there, but nobody knows anything about this thing and I'm hoping I can just upgrade toe OS somehow rather than try to replicate what's running on it, since now that I look at it, it appears to be some kind of Tomcat/LibreOffice hybrid abomination.
code:
infocon3 /var/mail # emerge --oneshot portage

 * IMPORTANT: 3 news items need reading for repository 'gentoo'.
 * Use eselect news read to view new items.

Calculating dependencies... done!

!!! All ebuilds that could satisfy ">=dev-lang/python-exec-2:=[python_targets_pypy3(-)?,python_targets_python3_6(-)?,python_targets_python3_7(-)?,python_targets_python3_8(-)?,-python_single_target_pypy3(-),-python_single_target_python3_6(-),-python_single_target_python3_7(-),-python_single_target_python3_8(-)]" have been masked.
!!! One of the following masked packages is required to complete your request:
- dev-lang/python-exec-9999::gentoo (masked by: EAPI 7)
- dev-lang/python-exec-2.4.6-r1::gentoo (masked by: EAPI 7)

The current version of portage supports EAPI '6'. You must upgrade to a
newer version of portage before EAPI masked packages can be installed.
(dependency required by "sys-apps/portage-9999::gentoo" [ebuild])
(dependency required by "portage" [argument])
For more information, see the MASKED PACKAGES section in the emerge
man page or refer to the Gentoo Handbook.

I haven't used gentoo in over a year, but it looks like you are trying to install the experimental git version of portage (marked by the 9999). It might start working if you deactivate that. I don't really remember how to do that though.

Otherwise your best bet is a full or partial reinstall, like the other guy suggested.

And yes, if you do some larger changes take the opportunity to switch distro. Rolling releases are amazing for desktops, but absolutely terrible if you aren't confident that you will update them at least every few months.

# ? May 28, 2020 12:10

Antigravitas: Dec 8, 2019; Die Rettung fuer die Landwirte:

It's saying "One of the following masked packages is required", i.e. you can have either =dev-lang/python-exec-2.4.6-r1 (stable on amd64) or =dev-lang/python-exec-9999 (masked since this is the straight from git build).

Thinking more about it maybe just getting the old EAPI6 .ebuild file and installing it via ebuild install may also work, but that circumvents the package dependency manager and may blow up your system.

And yeah, Gentoo will drop old ebuilds after a pretty short while so rebuilding an old version becomes nontrivial. You must move with the distro or the system gets left behind.

# ? May 28, 2020 12:23

BlankSystemDaemon: Mar 13, 2009

ewe2 posted:

ZFS is dead on Solaris and not as active in development on FreeBSD as it is on Linux. The problem isn't the code or the will to develop, it is partly because you can't just shoehorn ZFS into Linux and expect it to work the way it did in OmniOS or whatever remnant of Solaris you used, and partly because it can't live in the kernel because Oracle isn't going to give it up. It will live in userland limbo for who knows how long, but it's quite usable as a storage filesystem. I would like to see something ZFS-like in Linux, I liked the abstractions, but it did have its limitations which may no longer matter now in the age of SSDs.

Oracle ZFS (to differenciate it from OpenZFS) has had little to do with anything anyone's talking about when it comes to ZFS, for years. Oracle itself fired most of their OS team. It's completely irrelevant, and pointless to bring up since it's diverged around the time you and I started posting on these gay dead forums.

For OpenZFS, RAIDz expansion is being developed primarily on FreeBSD (and is being funded partially by the FreeBSD Foundation and Delphix, who Matt Ahrens works for). Even the most cursory look at the base system commit log for FreeBSD will show that both stuff from the newly named OpenZFS repo is being pulled in all the time, as well as new stuff being developed independently, and stuff being merged to the stable branches for the eventual 12.2- and 11.4-RELEASE.

Speaking of that repo, it's no longer ZoL, just OpenZFS.
Assuming things go to plan, eventually it'll be the basis for every ZFS implementation in Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, and which ever OS developers want to port the Solaris/Illumos compatibility layer that translates syscalls into OS-native ones, which was the entire plan with OpenZFS to begin with - the only thing that's changed is that it now includes OS-dependent bits as well as the OS-independent bits that were only in the original OpenZFS repo.

ZFS didn't conform to any of the ways FreeBSD does memory management (a lot of stuff had to be changed/expanded, and it still doesn't comform completely, because unlike on Linux, with FreeBSD there's a unified buffer cache for everything but ZFS). You'd also think that Linux, with its SysV background, would be closer to Solaris than a BSD is, which Sun diverged from with SunOS5 (what eventually became Solaris).
And you haven't really addressed that Linux ZFS implementation can never get optimized memory management and has to do its own optimizations for checksumming (SHA256 and SHA512t, skein) as well as optimized versions of distributed parity (XOR and matrix calculations in finite Galois fields), and also have to implement optimized versions of all the compressions algorithms OpenZFS offers (gzip, lz4, zstandard), plus they had to implement AES-CCM and AES-GCM - all because of the FUD spread by GPL zealots, Greg Kroan and Linus Torvalds himself. Meanwhile, any other implementation of ZFS can get that via libraries like zlib, libarchive, libzstd or things like the OpenCrypto Framework in FreeBSD (Linux also has one, as does other OS) which provide the cryptographic building blocks for them.

You seem to want it both ways, both that Linux can't have proper ZFS and that ZFS on Linux is better than everything. It doesn't work that way.
I guess that comes with an avatar like that.

BlankSystemDaemon fucked around with this message at 12:51 on May 28, 2020

# ? May 28, 2020 12:40

ewe2: Jul 1, 2009

D. Ebdrup posted:

You seem to want it both ways, both that Linux can't have proper ZFS and that ZFS on Linux is better than everything. It doesn't work that way.
I guess that comes with an avatar like that.

Actually I don't give a poo poo about ZFS, I was trying to be helpful but you have such a stick up your rear end, enjoy your misery. Another misery-guts gave me the avatar and their dumb waste of money gets funnier every day, much like your posting :toot:

# ? May 28, 2020 14:10

other people: Jun 27, 2004; Associate Christ

time for us to wrap up this thread and move on over to the bsd one. good work team!

# ? May 28, 2020 14:23

xzzy: Mar 5, 2009

Is this what it's like when you submit a patch for the kernel?

# ? May 28, 2020 14:25

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

Antigravitas posted:

I'd implore you to not boot from ZFS unless you are running FreeBSD. Relying on an out-of-tree module to be able to mount the root file system is unreliable.

ZFS as a data pool is heavenly to manage, but keep in mind that ZFS relies on the underlying devices not lying to it. USB attached devices tend to be liars.

I was going to use FAT for the root FS, probably, and ZFS just for the storage drives. Should I just use FreeBSD? How does the quality of ZFS compare on Linux? Another thing is, I don't think there is a disk encryption scheme that works for both BSD and Linux?

# ? May 28, 2020 19:06

Antigravitas: Dec 8, 2019; Die Rettung fuer die Landwirte:

FreeBSD used to have much better integration especially around the boot process. But I haven't used it since ZFS landed in Debian.

The somewhat divergend ZFS projects have been unifying so over time I'd expect most differences to get smoothed out, but the boot problem will probably remain as long as it remains out of tree on Linux, i.e. forever.

# ? May 28, 2020 19:51

MrOnBicycle: Jan 18, 2008; Wait wat?

This might be a silly question but I installed Manjaro distro in an attempt to get away from the bloated Windows 10 experience and so far (except for GPU crash?) it's been great. I keep getting the feeling that I should update drivers as it's brand new computer with a brand new install. Is this something I'm carrying over from Windows, and the latest drivers are already installed in the latest Manjaro distro, or should I do something? Kinda wish I had access to the Ryzen tools and graphics tools that are available on Windows for tweaking performance and making sure I've got the latest drivers.

Other than that I'm really liking it. Although it would be nice to press my middle mouse button to scroll by moving the mouse around.

# ? May 28, 2020 21:53

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

MrOnBicycle posted:

This might be a silly question but I installed Manjaro distro in an attempt to get away from the bloated Windows 10 experience and so far (except for GPU crash?) it's been great. I keep getting the feeling that I should update drivers as it's brand new computer with a brand new install. Is this something I'm carrying over from Windows, and the latest drivers are already installed in the latest Manjaro distro, or should I do something? Kinda wish I had access to the Ryzen tools and graphics tools that are available on Windows for tweaking performance and making sure I've got the latest drivers.

Other than that I'm really liking it. Although it would be nice to press my middle mouse button to scroll by moving the mouse around.

You are updating your drivers whenever you are updating your system using pamac.

# ? May 28, 2020 21:58

unimportantguy: Dec 25, 2012; Hey, Johnny, what's a "shitpost"?

As long as you install updates when the updater reminds you, you're up to date. It will keep your drivers updated for you.

Edit: :argh:

# ? May 28, 2020 22:00

Antigravitas: Dec 8, 2019; Die Rettung fuer die Landwirte:

Well, if you are a crazy person like me you can always compile an upstream version of the kernel and mesa (assuming AMD/Intel), that's how you can upgrade. Most device drivers purely live in the kernel so you upgrade by moving to a newer kernel release, and graphics drivers typically have a substantial portion in userland. You can even have several different drivers (in userland) living side by side, if you are even crazier.

Don't do any of that, though.

# ? May 28, 2020 22:21

BlankSystemDaemon: Mar 13, 2009

Antigravitas posted:

FreeBSD used to have much better integration especially around the boot process. But I haven't used it since ZFS landed in Debian.

The somewhat divergend ZFS projects have been unifying so over time I'd expect most differences to get smoothed out, but the boot problem will probably remain as long as it remains out of tree on Linux, i.e. forever.

Boot environments are really awesome for installing into when doing updates, and simply launching into it - and on FreeBSD and Illumos (though the implementation is different, unfortunately), you can even have it boot back into a known-good boot environment if it fails to boot properly (ie. watchdogd not telling the bmc over /dev/ipmi that the system is up, within a given timeframe).
With OpenZFS unifiying, it'll likely go into the special part of ZFS that's reserved for boot information (and which has so far not been used) - so as long as you have any EFI or GPT capable loader (say, GRUB, for Linux?), it can exist for all the places OpenZFS might eventually exist too.

# ? May 28, 2020 22:36

Methanar: Sep 26, 2013; by the sex ghost

zfs root fs linux bad

# ? May 28, 2020 22:41

Axe-man: Apr 16, 2005; The product of hundreds of hours of scientific investigation and research.

The perfect meatball.; Clapping Larry

Methanar posted:

zfs root fs linux bad

um acktually, it is zfs root fs Gnu using linux bad :suicide:

# ? May 29, 2020 06:28

MrOnBicycle: Jan 18, 2008; Wait wat?

VictualSquid posted:

You are updating your drivers whenever you are updating your system using pamac.

unimportantguy posted:

As long as you install updates when the updater reminds you, you're up to date. It will keep your drivers updated for you.

Edit:

Thanks, good to know. The more I use the Manjaro XFCE, the more I'm liking it. In the process of making dual boot windows 10 though as pretty much all the games I want to try on the new computer won't work on Linux.

MrOnBicycle fucked around with this message at 09:38 on May 29, 2020

# ? May 29, 2020 09:31

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

xtal posted:

I was going to use FAT for the root FS, probably

Um. What. That will not work for Linux. It's a DOS filesystem with no support for uids or permissions.

# ? May 29, 2020 13:03

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

D. Ebdrup posted:

You'd also think that Linux, with its SysV background, would be closer to Solaris than a BSD is, which Sun diverged from with SunOS5 (what eventually became Solaris).

What 'SysV background' do you think the Linux kernel has? Are you a Santa Cruz Operation rereg?

# ? May 29, 2020 13:08

BlankSystemDaemon: Mar 13, 2009

feedmegin posted:

What 'SysV background' do you think the Linux kernel has? Are you a Santa Cruz Operation rereg?

I meant that it has more in common with SysV than it does with BSD, and Solaris is based on SysV whereas SunOS4 and prior was based on BSD.

You know me, or ought to know me, enough to know that I wouldn't suggest that Linux is somehow based on System 5, right?

# ? May 29, 2020 15:36

SoftNum: Mar 31, 2011

MrOnBicycle posted:

Thanks, good to know. The more I use the Manjaro XFCE, the more I'm liking it. In the process of making dual boot windows 10 though as pretty much all the games I want to try on the new computer won't work on Linux.

Which games? You really should look into Proton(for steam) https://www.protondb.com/ or Lutris (for non steam) https://lutris.net/. Honestly a ton of stuff works with minimal effort.

# ? May 29, 2020 16:04

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

MrOnBicycle posted:

Thanks, good to know. The more I use the Manjaro XFCE, the more I'm liking it. In the process of making dual boot windows 10 though as pretty much all the games I want to try on the new computer won't work on Linux.

Depending on how old your computer is relative to the games, you could go with a virtual machine instead of double booting.

And a surprising amount of games runs with wine and lutri makes that easy to setup.

# ? May 29, 2020 17:06

Combat Pretzel: Jun 23, 2004; No, seriously... what kurds?!

Why do people use packagecloud.io to host their repositories? I tried to upgrade to Grafana 7 today, which uses it for their OSS release, and it returns an 429 errors (too many requests). And if I look it up on Google, that issue goes way back to the creation of time.

# ? May 29, 2020 17:55

OhFunny: Jun 26, 2013; EXTREMELY PISSED AT THE DNC

MrOnBicycle posted:

Other than that I'm really liking it. Although it would be nice to press my middle mouse button to scroll by moving the mouse around.

You're using FireFox? Go to Preferences and scroll to the bottom of the General tab option and under Browsing click Use Autoscrolling.

Don't know why that's not on by default.

# ? May 29, 2020 18:05

xtal: Jan 9, 2011; by Fluffdaddy

feedmegin posted:

Um. What. That will not work for Linux. It's a DOS filesystem with no support for uids or permissions.

I mean one of the variants that works on Linux, it's pretty common for the sd card on a raspberry pi to be set up that way, I think

# ? May 29, 2020 22:37

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

xtal posted:

I mean one of the variants that works on Linux, it's pretty common for the sd card on a raspberry pi to be set up that way, I think

Thats a quirk of the Pi's bootloader which uses it to load the kernel and only speaks FAT. it's /boot on the Pi once booted. / cannot be FAT. They all 'work' on Linux but don't have the features needed for a general purpose Unix filesystem.

feedmegin fucked around with this message at 23:32 on May 29, 2020

# ? May 29, 2020 23:26

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

D. Ebdrup posted:

I meant that it has more in common with SysV than it does with BSD, and Solaris is based on SysV whereas SunOS4 and prior was based on BSD.

You know me, or ought to know me, enough to know that I wouldn't suggest that Linux is somehow based on System 5, right?

Right...my point is we are talking about adding stuff to the kernel though. So the specific source code base matters. Precisely because Linux does not derive from the SysV source, it offers no advantage in incorporating kernel source intended originally for a SysV kernel. There's no more commonality of architecture or data structures any more than there would be with BSD.

But yes I wasn't seriously suggesting you thought that.

# ? May 29, 2020 23:31

Chilled Milk: Jun 22, 2003; No one here is alone,
satellites in every home

OhFunny posted:

You're using FireFox? Go to Preferences and scroll to the bottom of the General tab option and under Browsing click Use Autoscrolling.

Don't know why that's not on by default.

And if you have to use the bad program Chrome for whatever reason, you need an addon.

# ? May 30, 2020 03:32

apropos man: Sep 5, 2016; You get a hundred and forty one thousand years and you're out in eight!

This post *should* really be in a hardware thread somewhere, but I'm gonna put it here because I'm looking for a consensus based on Linux servers.

Does anyone run a home server made up of the bits of crap you've got left over from other PC's? Or maybe it's a home server but it's quite thoughtfully put together.

Anyway, I don't think I'm uncommon in having a couple of boxes round the house:

1. Running CentOS and has a Ryzen 1700 in it, 32GB of relatively slow DDR4, 3 SSD's in RAID. I may put another two sticks of RAM in it but don't care if they match the existing sticks.

2. Skylake Xeon (E3-1245 v6), 48GB of DDR4 unregistered ECC in it, one NVMe drive and a couple of WD Red's in a mirror. Again, running CentOS and a few VM's for Plex/Jellyfin/music streaming/samba etc. This system may have an older graphics card in it sometimes (for transcoding) or sometimes I whip out the GPU for other projects.

I've got some ageing EVGA gaming PSU's in these two, and they'll probably need replacing at some point. So my question is "what PSU's do people like me generally use on a Linux server that's probably got a load of less than 1 a lot of the time?"

PSU's are quite expensive these days and systems like this are rarely pulling more than 100W. 150W for short periods at absolute maximum.

apropos man fucked around with this message at 12:44 on May 30, 2020

# ? May 30, 2020 12:38

MrOnBicycle: Jan 18, 2008; Wait wat?

VictualSquid posted:

Depending on how old your computer is relative to the games, you could go with a virtual machine instead of double booting.

And a surprising amount of games runs with wine and lutri makes that easy to setup.

SoftNum posted:

Which games? You really should look into Proton(for steam) https://www.protondb.com/ or Lutris (for non steam) https://lutris.net/. Honestly a ton of stuff works with minimal effort.

Brand new. I checked Proton and Lutris but none of the games were supported. It's cool though, I'll use a dual boot for the games.

OhFunny posted:

You're using FireFox? Go to Preferences and scroll to the bottom of the General tab option and under Browsing click Use Autoscrolling.

Don't know why that's not on by default.

Thanks!

# ? May 30, 2020 18:54

BlankSystemDaemon: Mar 13, 2009

OhFunny posted:

You're using FireFox? Go to Preferences and scroll to the bottom of the General tab option and under Browsing click Use Autoscrolling.

Don't know why that's not on by default.

Holy poo poo, this changed on my setup at some point! I had it working, then around the time I upgraded from an old xorg-server to the newest version (which includes support for evdev), it stopped working - but now it work again!
Thank you so much!

# ? May 30, 2020 20:01

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

So, after the recent BSD discussion I thought about giving it a try.
Even found nomadBSD which is a portable BSD, so I can try it out directly.
It was slow as dirt, and while I initially suspected my old and cheap usb-stick I tried to find out if it can run from ramdisk and found people complaining that portable linux runs fine on their sticks.

So I went to check out the current state of portable linux:

quote:

As of Porteus Version 1.1, the officially supported method for installing Porteus to a flash drive or hard drive is to burn the ISO image to a CD following the instructions written above, then boot Porteus from the CD and run the program 'Porteus Installer',

Most of the distros (slax, MX) expect you to install to usb by running a shellscript that "autodetects" if it should install the bootloader to the usb-stick or your actual harddrive's MBR.
Knoppix hasn't updated their website since the last time I was there. Back when internet was so slow that you tended to order CDs by mail.
And they were exceedingly unclear on if those are persistent installs or if the changes are wiped at reboot.
The only reasonably well documented portabel distro I found was the :tinfoil:

one, tails.

# ? May 30, 2020 21:49

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# ? Apr 19, 2024 22:57

BlankSystemDaemon: Mar 13, 2009

VictualSquid posted:

So, after the recent BSD discussion I thought about giving it a try.
Even found nomadBSD which is a portable BSD, so I can try it out directly.
It was slow as dirt, and while I initially suspected my old and cheap usb-stick I tried to find out if it can run from ramdisk and found people complaining that portable linux runs fine on their sticks.

So I went to check out the current state of portable linux:

Most of the distros (slax, MX) expect you to install to usb by running a shellscript that "autodetects" if it should install the bootloader to the usb-stick or your actual harddrive's MBR.
Knoppix hasn't updated their website since the last time I was there. Back when internet was so slow that you tended to order CDs by mail.
And they were exceedingly unclear on if those are persistent installs or if the changes are wiped at reboot.
The only reasonably well documented portabel distro I found was the one, tails.

I'm not familiar with NomadBSD, but I imagine anything that qualifies as a persistent image is by its nature bound to run from a USB stick, which is never going to be fast because UFS is probably not the fastest filesystem ever invented.
To paraphrase McKusick who made FFS in BSD in the early 80s and still makes UFS in FreeBSD to this day: if you throw away peoples data once, they don't tend to trust you again.

I think either FuryBSD, GhostBSD, or both(?) use geom_uzip to create a disk-like structure from a zipped file which is mapped into memory with tmpfs? I don't see how you can write that to disk without having to recompress it first, though - and that kinda defeats the point, no?

# ? May 30, 2020 23:20

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

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