Re: [gentoo-user] kernel 2.6 upgrade howto

[Jean-Francois Gagnon Laporte]

On Tue, 7 Dec 2004 10:58:22 +0100, Maarten <gentoo@××××××××.org> wrote:
> On Monday 06 December 2004 20:25, Jean-Francois Gagnon Laporte wrote:
> > On Mon, 6 Dec 2004 19:57:15 +0100, Maarten <gentoo@××××××××.org> wrote:
> > > On Monday 06 December 2004 19:23, Jean-Francois Gagnon Laporte wrote:
> > > > On Mon, 6 Dec 2004 18:47:43 +0100, Maarten <gentoo@××××××××.org> wrote:
>
>
> OK. done that, but first the 'emerge world' proved to be quite a bit longer
> than I expected as it included X and mozilla amongst others.
> I believe my poor old pentium3 500 is still pounding on it, hehe.
> So things take way longer than expected (no hurry though).
> Does this like happen every other week, having one or the other 'major'
> ebuilds renewed ? I mean of the size of X, or Kde, or OOo, glibc and alike ?
> I'm beginning to believe my pentium3 is severely underpowered here... ;)
>
That depends on how often you update. If you do it once a week
probably not. But i'm one of those stupid people who like to update
once per day. Altough my servers don't see a lot of compile time on
stable and at most once per week.

> What is your opinion on the udev vs ... choice ?
Personnally udev is the way to go, most of the troubles of the early
days are gone if not all. Never had any troubles with and as a bonus
you can reserve some blocks to some device like if you like your usb
key to always be /dev/sda. It's pretty flexible, useful, it's not
deprecated and it's maintained.

> Which is best when handling lots of hotpluggable devices (usb-storage etc) or
> is there no real difference there ?
Hotplug + coldplug (hotplugging at boot)

>  What happens if I need to boot a 2.4
> kernel, will the missing and/or incompatible /dev structure not bite me ?
>
Well, now that modules-init-tools support both kernel series there's
only one thing stopping you : devfsd vs udev :). But there's hope !

Don't know what are the settings available on the stable baselayout
but here's an interesting snippet of my /etc/conf.d/rc :

# Use this variable to control the /dev management behavior.
#  auto   - let the scripts figure out what's best at boot
#  devfs  - use devfs (requires sys-fs/devfsd)
#  udev   - use udev (requires sys-fs/udev)
#  static - let the user manage static nodes

RC_DEVICES="auto"

So in a resume you can run a 2.4 kernel with devfsd and it will be
detected and used. Since udev is a userland program, a 2.4 kernel will
not be bothered with it. That's in theory, I don't know if devfsd and
udev will block each other in portage. If not well run devfsd only
until you switch completly to 2.6.

> 8-)
> Go right ahead.  I should be quite fluent in linux now, just the gentoo part
> is new. But I've used old slackware, redhat, suse & debian (in that order)
> So feel free to skip the basics. The USE flags and some of the paths of config
> structures daunt me for now but that's basically it. And I want to learn
> gentoo the *right* way, not the easy-but-you-will-regret-that-later way.
>
That's the spirit ! Browse the documentation & tips and trick section
of the forum. It's so juicy with goodies it's unbelievable. Anyway
will all of the doc available, it's pretty to figure it out ;).

> Lol indeed; I fully agree.  Lilo caused me no end of trouble, and quite
> recently even cost me over 2 days work with 480 GB raid5 data at stake, more
> or less.  Well, long story, I'll not bore you with it but suffice to say that
> some new SATA boards' drive mapping will wreak havoc on how lilo will see
> drives (let alone BOOT from any of them). I've seen more L99 99 99 99 and L00
> 00 00 00 errors than I really care to remember.  Lilo is dead for me now.
> I'll never touch it again. (Well, after the legacy systems have gone...)
>
All I can say is that I understand you better than you could know
(damn I hate redhat ... oops sorry OT ... must control rage ...)

> Hey, I already like this list, feels right at home  :-))
> Thanks for the welcome!
>
> Now to get 2.6 + kismet + gpsd running and I'm truely happy.
> All the rest seems to work fine already.
>
> Maarten
>
No problem !

Enjoy your shiney new gentoo

regards,

Jean-Francois

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