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Gentoo Developers Exploring The Possibility Of Shipping Distribution Binary Kernels

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  • #31
    Originally posted by ThoreauHD View Post
    I haven't heard of a kernel dev yet that used Gentoo.
    "You do know I’m also a Gentoo developer, right?"
    — Greg Kroah-Hartman

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    • #32
      One of the biggest appeals of Gentoo has always been the ease at which one can compile a custom kernel with the curses based menu configuration. Gentoo was the first system I ever compiled a custom kernel on for an old p4 system I use for a spare. Think I got the RAM usage at the terminal down to 30MB and I was so proud of myself. Compared to FreeBSD where you have to edit a text configuration file that is confusing. OpenBSD goes as far as to basically make it a commandment that thou shall not compile a custom kernel (seriously read how frowned upon it is in Absolute OpenBSD or ask about it on Reddit!). Linux has always been easy to configure a custom kernel and cut out stuff not needed for your hardware. It is one of the things I most love about it!

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      • #33
        Originally posted by grigi View Post
        Honestly, as a long-time gentoo user, I always disliked how high-touch kernel updates were in comparison to everything else.
        A simple emerge @world would just build everything with my last configuration. But the kernel involved manual steps.
        I used Gentoo for about 2 years on custom storage servers before I switched to something else.

        I found package updates were more of a hassle than kernel updates since my preference is to run packages with the least amount of features. For example, on a system that does not have an audio chip (it can only beep a speaker), why compile packages to include audio support? Of course undoing stuff like that or video codecs can unravel a mess of other stuff; it varies by package, probably due to the internal modularity of the software design.

        For kernel updates I had a simple solution that I mostly scripted. I would backup the current dot-config file since I knew it worked. Then step through the kernel upgrade config process; about 2 or 3 minutes, dependent on how deeply I thought about it. Then compile the new kernel and make any necessary changes to boot the system. If aftering booting the new kernel I found that it blew up, then I knew I could quickly recover to the previous working kernel and dot-config with a system reboot and a wee bit of scripting magic.

        Yes, Gentoo updates can be a bit of work, but you should have quickly realized that when you adopted Gentoo as your chosen Linux distribution. Then you could either accept it as the way Gentoo life is or you could have moved to another distribution.

        If you want something as simple as "emerge @world", change over to Debian, Ubuntu, (sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade), or a MAC, or even Windoze 10 (updates done automatcially for you).

        Perhaps consider Arch, but I remember a few Arch updates in the past that required a little bit of manual intervention, but Arch seems good about documenting that.

        Comment


        • #34
          Originally posted by eidolon View Post
          Greg KH is my favorite candidate to "vote off the island".

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          • #35
            Kernel configuration is fairly problematic for a few reasons:
            • Defaults suck, even for amd64.
            • There's no easy way to get a generic kernel like other distros ship, things like allmodconfig are utterly broken.
            • oldconfig is kinda broken too, even if it usually works fine. Sometimes you need to start from scratch or you'll get a mashup of old and new defaults.
            • It's not at all like other ebuilds. It just downloads sources.

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            • #36
              About time -- I stopped experimenting with Gentoo because I was sick of spending so much time compiling the kernel, only to discover that it didn't work and having to do it over again.

              Code:
              for ThisIsRidiculous in 0..7 {
                 guess_and_change();
                 compile();
                 swear();
              };
              It got to the point where I simply compiled the kernel with pretty much everything that wasn't obviously unneeded (built-in floppy/parallel port/non-$MYCPU-support/etc) turned on, which obviously takes much longer... and then saying, "**** it" and installing a binary Firefox package.

              Kinda defeats the point.

              I ended up sticking to Arch, and now Debian Stable, to get away from it. (I don't have Internet where I live, so downloading the ISOs with jigdo-lite is a dev-send, while Arch is... impractical for the desktop.)

              Comment


              • #37
                Originally posted by NotMine999 View Post

                I used Gentoo for about 2 years on custom storage servers before I switched to something else.

                I found package updates were more of a hassle than kernel updates since my preference is to run packages with the least amount of features. For example, on a system that does not have an audio chip (it can only beep a speaker), why compile packages to include audio support? Of course undoing stuff like that or video codecs can unravel a mess of other stuff; it varies by package, probably due to the internal modularity of the software design.

                For kernel updates I had a simple solution that I mostly scripted. I would backup the current dot-config file since I knew it worked. Then step through the kernel upgrade config process; about 2 or 3 minutes, dependent on how deeply I thought about it. Then compile the new kernel and make any necessary changes to boot the system. If aftering booting the new kernel I found that it blew up, then I knew I could quickly recover to the previous working kernel and dot-config with a system reboot and a wee bit of scripting magic.

                Yes, Gentoo updates can be a bit of work, but you should have quickly realized that when you adopted Gentoo as your chosen Linux distribution. Then you could either accept it as the way Gentoo life is or you could have moved to another distribution.

                If you want something as simple as "emerge @world", change over to Debian, Ubuntu, (sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade), or a MAC, or even Windoze 10 (updates done automatcially for you).

                Perhaps consider Arch, but I remember a few Arch updates in the past that required a little bit of manual intervention, but Arch seems good about documenting that.
                I am prefectly happy with Gentoo, and what I mean by low maintenance upgrades is that once your use flags are all set to how you want/need it, (and using the desired profile) it makes things easy to keep it that way. Especially with all the newer depencency tracking where it auto rebuilds dependants if the library they used is changing incompatibly.
                On the counter, I have to copy the .config over, tell it to do an autoconfig, build kernel/modules, install kernel/modules, emerge @module-rebuild (only for virtualbox, I'm working on migrating over to kvm2), grub setup. And then eventually reboot.

                And lo and behold, a new intel vulnerability workaround was implemented that breaks suspend/resume (happend twice this year). Or causes the system to randomly reboot (once this year) Or causes my tests to run literally six times slower (also only once this year).

                So I am quite loathe to upgrade the kernel. I have had more regressions upgrading the stable kernel than the entire of userspace, and all due to some whack-a-mole workaround that required some special config flag be set in a way that requires me reading lots of docs before system works right again.

                But, the problem here isn't gentoo per se, alas...

                Comment


                • #38
                  This is a very welcome change.

                  I have been a very long time gentoo user, simply because gentoo gives me the kind of control over my userspace that no other distro does and makes it EASY. Seriously, I think that people who think that the main benefit of gentoo is being able to set custom compile flags to potentially get faster performance or something, are missing the point. To me the big value of gentoo is the flexibility you get in the versions and configuration of software you install, which gentoo makes sure will work well together. Gentoo has been the most reliably working distro for me, period (especially since I don't use crazy compiler optimization flags as I don't want to break things). On other distros things break if you do anything even slightly unusual. You can't do partial upgrades, you can't mix and match versions, you can't easily use git versions, you can't easily apply patches to software, etc. On gentoo everything just works. You don't even need 3rd party repositories for this stuff, you can do these things with just the official repo.

                  However, I literally do not care about the kernel. I want a kernel that just works and supports everything that I might want to use it for. For my gentoo kernels, I just copy the config from the Arch Linux repos and make a few really minor tweaks (if even that) and just use that. Having a binary package with a standard configuration would be very welcome and would save a lot of unnecessary hassle. Honestly, kernels have been my only major troublesome point with gentoo (other than the time needed to wait for things to compile, which is unavoidable for a source-based distro, and i consider to be a tradeoff worth the benefits of using gentoo).

                  Also BTW, honestly, if you are a gentoo user and you have more than 1 system / you have access to a powerful computer, and you still havent tried using gentoo binpkgs, I highly recommend it. My fast server machine has binhosts to build stuff for my other systems and all the gentoo packages are built there. On my other systems, I configured portage to use binpkgs only and download the already compiled stuff from the server. This means they also don't have to install build dependencies and I can avoid needing to install all the multitude of programming languages, build systems, compilers, and other dev tools people use nowadays on every system, which are needed to actually compile the packages. The experience is great (after the initial setup which takes a bit of effort, but still turned out to be easier than I imagined it would be before I tried it).

                  EDIT: There is no downside to these new binary kernels. Gentoo is all about freedom of choice. It is great that people now have even more choice and don't have to bother with the kernel if they don't want to. Those who want to customize it can keep doing what they always have; the old way of doing kernels in gentoo is still supported. I know I will be using both systems.
                  Last edited by tajjada; 22 December 2019, 04:08 PM.

                  Comment


                  • #39
                    Originally posted by mulenmar View Post
                    About time -- I stopped experimenting with Gentoo because I was sick of spending so much time compiling the kernel, only to discover that it didn't work and having to do it over again.

                    Code:
                    for ThisIsRidiculous in 0..7 {
                    guess_and_change();
                    compile();
                    swear();
                    };
                    It got to the point where I simply compiled the kernel with pretty much everything that wasn't obviously unneeded (built-in floppy/parallel port/non-$MYCPU-support/etc) turned on, which obviously takes much longer... and then saying, "**** it" and installing a binary Firefox package.

                    Kinda defeats the point.

                    I ended up sticking to Arch, and now Debian Stable, to get away from it. (I don't have Internet where I live, so downloading the ISOs with jigdo-lite is a dev-send, while Arch is... impractical for the desktop.)
                    Wrong on all counts.

                    I would argue that Arch is perfectly fine for desktop use. However, if you don't have internet access, then the installation process might be more difficult for you.

                    As for Gentoo: if you take the time initially to figure out what you're doing, you gain the benefits of learning something new as well as a kernel config that you can/should reuse whenever a new kernel build becomes available. I do have to say, though, since I've been spoiled by some of the latest technology available, it's become more difficult to empathize with those complaining about long build times. Although, perhaps that's the reason why I haven't tried to use Gentoo on older, standalone systems; especially not without a procedure in place like distcc, or cross-compiling, or otherwise pre-compiling my own binaries.

                    Arguably, there are certain use-cases where it's not feasible to use Gentoo, especially in the same manner that other distros are used;

                    i.e. install --> minimal time to configure --> and apply semi-automated updates.

                    However, it is increasingly important to make sure that we have choices and more fine-grained control in software. That's not to say that it's impossible to do so using some other distros, but it is the primary concern and focus in Gentoo throughout the project.

                    Comment


                    • #40
                      Originally posted by grigi View Post

                      I am prefectly happy with Gentoo, and what I mean by low maintenance upgrades is that once your use flags are all set to how you want/need it, (and using the desired profile) it makes things easy to keep it that way. Especially with all the newer depencency tracking where it auto rebuilds dependants if the library they used is changing incompatibly.
                      On the counter, I have to copy the .config over, tell it to do an autoconfig, build kernel/modules, install kernel/modules, emerge @module-rebuild (only for virtualbox, I'm working on migrating over to kvm2), grub setup. And then eventually reboot.

                      And lo and behold, a new intel vulnerability workaround was implemented that breaks suspend/resume (happend twice this year). Or causes the system to randomly reboot (once this year) Or causes my tests to run literally six times slower (also only once this year).

                      So I am quite loathe to upgrade the kernel. I have had more regressions upgrading the stable kernel than the entire of userspace, and all due to some whack-a-mole workaround that required some special config flag be set in a way that requires me reading lots of docs before system works right again.

                      But, the problem here isn't gentoo per se, alas...
                      Indeed; the safest thing is to stick to the stable (LTS) versions of the kernel. Otherwise, just as with Arch, you could experience certain regressions in latest, unstable kernel releases.

                      Comment

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