[gentoo-alpha] Gentoo Alpha questions

[gentoo-alpha] Gentoo Alpha questions

[Jean-Sébastien Guay]

Hello,

I am thinking of moving from Debian to Gentoo on my home server, which
is an Alpha XL-366 (xlt milo image). The machine currently runs Apache2,
ssh, fetchmail and procmail with spamassassin and clamav to filter
unwanted mails, a simple firewall script (iptables, with nat and
masquerading for my networked machines, can be found at
http://www.asgardsrealm.net/linux/firewall/) and acts as a file server
using Samba. I have a few questions to ask of people who have been using
Gentoo on Alpha for a while.

1. I heard that the fact that you can compile everything for your
machine type, with all the necessary optimisations, makes a nice
difference in system speed. How true is it? Can someone with a similar
setup to my own comment on that? I'm especially hoping that Perl will
see a nice speedup, since I do lots of Perl coding in my free time, and
spamassassin is written in Perl too and currently takes about 3-5
seconds per message.

2. Will the transition from Debian to Gentoo be painful? I'm especially
worried about getting everything to work the same as it did on Debian as
fast as possible. As you can see above, the whole home network depends
on this machine...

3. Also, how do you think the transition from apt to portage will be?
I'm wondering if it's similar to apt, in the sense that you can download
updates (new versions) to currently installed software and install them
automatically (compiling as needed, I guess).

Thanks in advance,

________________________________________________
Jean-Sébastien Guay        jean_seb@videotron.ca
                  http://whitestar02.webhop.org/



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[gentoo-alpha] Gentoo Alpha questions

[Jean-Sébastien Guay]

Hello,

I am thinking of moving from Debian to Gentoo on my home server, which
is an Alpha XL-366 (xlt milo image). The machine currently runs Apache2,
ssh, fetchmail and procmail with spamassassin and clamav to filter
unwanted mails, a simple firewall script (iptables, with nat and
masquerading for my networked machines, can be found at
http://www.asgardsrealm.net/linux/firewall/) and acts as a file server
using Samba. I have a few questions to ask of people who have been using
Gentoo on Alpha for a while.

1. I heard that the fact that you can compile everything for your
machine type, with all the necessary optimisations, makes a nice
difference in system speed. How true is it? Can someone with a similar
setup to my own comment on that? I'm especially hoping that Perl will
see a nice speedup, since I do lots of Perl coding in my free time, and
spamassassin is written in Perl too and currently takes about 3-5
seconds per message.

2. Will the transition from Debian to Gentoo be painful? I'm especially
worried about getting everything to work the same as it did on Debian as
fast as possible. As you can see above, the whole home network depends
on this machine...

3. Also, how do you think the transition from apt to portage will be?
I'm wondering if it's similar to apt, in the sense that you can download
updates (new versions) to currently installed software and install them
automatically (compiling as needed, I guess).

Thanks in advance,

________________________________________________
Jean-Sébastien Guay        jean_seb@videotron.ca
                  http://whitestar02.webhop.org/



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RE: [gentoo-alpha] Gentoo Alpha questions

[Jean-Sébastien Guay]

> Hello,
[...]

Oops, sorry for the double-post...

________________________________________________
Jean-Sébastien Guay        jean_seb@videotron.ca
                  http://whitestar02.webhop.org/




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RE: [gentoo-alpha] Gentoo Alpha questions

[Donsbach, Jeff]

Jean-Sebatien,

I too have an XL-366 and just recently went through the Gentoo install. It was not all the difficult. If you are already running a 2.4 kernel, it will be pretty easy. That was my biggest hurdle in that I has still been running on old 2.2.19 kernel.

Yes, you can custom build things for your machine type (ev56). I have already noticed that it does seem a bit snappier than before. I had been running Red Hat 6.2 (ancient I know). How I went about it is I basically installed the system stuff (/, /usr, /var ) to an unused partition. Then I followed the instructions on the gentoo site for "Installing from a running system". Basically, you start by untarring one of the "stages" (I started with Stage 1) to your new partition and then doing a "chroot" to that from the running system. Then you kick off the bootstrap process. Starting from Stage 1, I think my system ran almost all night building things. The process would probably be faster if you started from a higher stage or tried an install from the LiveCD (a new image for that was offered up last week by Jay Maynard).

As for Perl performance, I haven't done enough Perl work to say whether the performance difference in using a "-mcpu ev56" build flag is noticeable or not.

Apache 2 installs without a hitch. I did have a problem building Samba last week though, which I haven't had time to chase down yet. I'm getting some duplicate/conflicting symbol definitions in two header files.

One thing I did notice is that the "vanilla-sources" kernel source tree does not seem to obey the Portage build flags for machine type that I had set. It still built an "ev5" kernel even though I had set "-mcpu ev56" build flags for Portage. I looked at it a little bit and it looked like a few tweaks to the kernel source Makefiles would fix that problem. It may already be fixed in one of the other kernel trees (alpha-sources and/or compaq-sources for instance). I didn't look however.

I have also installed the sshd daemon and that works fine too. I have not tied fetchmail, or SpamAssassin yet. However, I "force built" Zope 2.6.4 (it was not marked to build on alpha in the Portage tree) and so far that too seems to be working too.

I haven't worked with Debian/apt a lot, but in the respects you mention, it sounds very similar. Portage will download and build necessary dependencies as well. I did find that the Portage tree (/usr/portage) did start eating up space rather quickly (I have some pretty small disks) and I ended up moving it to a partition of it's own. 

Keep posting questions as you hit them.

Jeff D

-----Original Message-----
From: Jean-Sébastien Guay [mailto:jean_seb@videotron.ca] 
Sent: Friday, March 05, 2004 10:09 AM
To: Gentoo-Alpha Mailing List
Subject: [gentoo-alpha] Gentoo Alpha questions


Hello,

I am thinking of moving from Debian to Gentoo on my home server, which is an Alpha XL-366 (xlt milo image). The machine currently runs Apache2, ssh, fetchmail and procmail with spamassassin and clamav to filter unwanted mails, a simple firewall script (iptables, with nat and masquerading for my networked machines, can be found at
http://www.asgardsrealm.net/linux/firewall/) and acts as a file server using Samba. I have a few questions to ask of people who have been using Gentoo on Alpha for a while.

1. I heard that the fact that you can compile everything for your machine type, with all the necessary optimisations, makes a nice difference in system speed. How true is it? Can someone with a similar setup to my own comment on that? I'm especially hoping that Perl will see a nice speedup, since I do lots of Perl coding in my free time, and spamassassin is written in Perl too and currently takes about 3-5 seconds per message.

2. Will the transition from Debian to Gentoo be painful? I'm especially worried about getting everything to work the same as it did on Debian as fast as possible. As you can see above, the whole home network depends on this machine...

3. Also, how do you think the transition from apt to portage will be? I'm wondering if it's similar to apt, in the sense that you can download updates (new versions) to currently installed software and install them automatically (compiling as needed, I guess).

Thanks in advance,

________________________________________________
Jean-Sébastien Guay        jean_seb@videotron.ca
                  http://whitestar02.webhop.org/



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Re: [gentoo-alpha] Gentoo Alpha questions

[Marc Giger]

On Fri, 5 Mar 2004 10:35:34 -0500
"Donsbach, Jeff" <jeff.donsbach@hp.com> wrote:

> 
> Jean-Sebatien,
> 
> I too have an XL-366 and just recently went through the Gentoo
> install. It was not all the difficult. If you are already running a
> 2.4 kernel, it will be pretty easy. That was my biggest hurdle in that
> I has still been running on old 2.2.19 kernel.
> 
> Yes, you can custom build things for your machine type (ev56). I have
> already noticed that it does seem a bit snappier than before. I had
> been running Red Hat 6.2 (ancient I know). How I went about it is I
> basically installed the system stuff (/, /usr, /var ) to an unused
> partition. Then I followed the instructions on the gentoo site for
> "Installing from a running system". Basically, you start by untarring
> one of the "stages" (I started with Stage 1) to your new partition and
> then doing a "chroot" to that from the running system. Then you kick
> off the bootstrap process. Starting from Stage 1, I think my system
> ran almost all night building things. The process would probably be
> faster if you started from a higher stage or tried an install from the
> LiveCD (a new image for that was offered up last week by Jay Maynard).
> 
> As for Perl performance, I haven't done enough Perl work to say
> whether the performance difference in using a "-mcpu ev56" build flag
> is noticeable or not.

Forget it. If you want a real performance boost with perl you should try
to compile it with ccc. Good luck and a lot of fun:-)

> 
> Apache 2 installs without a hitch. I did have a problem building Samba

Hehe, yes installs without a hitch but...I had a runtime problem with
the db module in apache (sdbm?). It was miscompiled with optimisation
enabled. I know that since a long time, but it was undergone. I will
post a patch for that.

> last week though, which I haven't had time to chase down yet. I'm
> getting some duplicate/conflicting symbol definitions in two header
> files.
> 
> One thing I did notice is that the "vanilla-sources" kernel source
> tree does not seem to obey the Portage build flags for machine type
> that I had set. It still built an "ev5" kernel even though I had set
> "-mcpu ev56" build flags for Portage. I looked at it a little bit and
> it looked like a few tweaks to the kernel source Makefiles would fix
> that problem. It may already be fixed in one of the other kernel trees
> (alpha-sources and/or compaq-sources for instance). I didn't look
> however.

That's totally right, because the CFLAGS in portage has nothing to do
with the CFLAGS in the kernel tree. So if you wish to compile with ev56
then you should select the right processor-variant in .config .
Are you sure that you have an ev56? XL-366 doesn't sound like an ev56:-)
but I may be wrong since I haven't looked up.

> 
> I have also installed the sshd daemon and that works fine too. I have
> not tied fetchmail, or SpamAssassin yet. However, I "force built" Zope
> 2.6.4 (it was not marked to build on alpha in the Portage tree) and so
> far that too seems to be working too.

Last week I installed zope too. I will fill a bugreport so that Aron
mark it stable. Ok?!

greets

Marc

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RE: [gentoo-alpha] Gentoo Alpha questions

[Donsbach, Jeff]

> Are you sure that you have an ev56? XL-366 doesn't sound like an
ev56:-) but I may be wrong since I >haven't looked up.

Yes, it is. XL366 & 433 (433 is a rare beast) are EV56. XL-300 was EV5.
XL-266 & 233 were EV45.

Jeff D

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Re: [gentoo-alpha] Gentoo Alpha questions

[Marc Giger]

> Apache 2 installs without a hitch. I did have a problem building Samba
> last week though, which I haven't had time to chase down yet. I'm
> getting some duplicate/conflicting symbol definitions in two header
> files.

Samba 2.2.8a ? Just (test-)compiled with USE="-cups" . No problems here.

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RE: [gentoo-alpha] Gentoo Alpha questions

[Donsbach, Jeff]

I don't remember the version. I'll have to look. I don't think I was
using USE="-cups" though, so I'll try that too.

-----Original Message-----
From: Marc Giger [mailto:gigerstyle@gmx.ch] 
Sent: Friday, March 05, 2004 11:44 AM
To: gentoo-alpha@lists.gentoo.org
Subject: Re: [gentoo-alpha] Gentoo Alpha questions


> Apache 2 installs without a hitch. I did have a problem building Samba

> last week though, which I haven't had time to chase down yet. I'm 
> getting some duplicate/conflicting symbol definitions in two header 
> files.

Samba 2.2.8a ? Just (test-)compiled with USE="-cups" . No problems here.

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RE: [gentoo-alpha] Gentoo Alpha questions

[Jean-Sébastien Guay]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for the answers. There are two other things I wanted to know...

1. Did anyone with a milo-only machine (like my Alpha XL-366) have
trouble booting from the LiveCD? I was never able to boot from the
Debian installation CD, and had to start the installation from
diskettes...

2. Are there often problems compiling stuff like what Jeff talked about
in his message? I would hate my server to be down for a day/week because
some new version of an essential daemon (like exim, sshd, apache)
refused to compile.

Thanks in advance,

J-S

________________________________________________
Jean-Sébastien Guay        jean_seb@videotron.ca
                  http://whitestar02.webhop.org/




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Re: [gentoo-alpha] Gentoo Alpha questions

[Marc Giger]

Jean-Sébastien,

On Sat, 06 Mar 2004 10:14:27 -0500
Jean-Sébastien Guay <jean_seb@videotron.ca> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> Thanks for the answers. There are two other things I wanted to know...
> 
> 1. Did anyone with a milo-only machine (like my Alpha XL-366) have
> trouble booting from the LiveCD? I was never able to boot from the
> Debian installation CD, and had to start the installation from
> diskettes...

Jeff? 

> 
> 2. Are there often problems compiling stuff like what Jeff talked
> about in his message? I would hate my server to be down for a day/week
> because some new version of an essential daemon (like exim, sshd,
> apache) refused to compile.

I think you got a wrong impression. It's rather an exception that a
package can not be compiled. ALL ebuilds which are marked stable are
stable especially on alpha (mistakes happens).

greets

Marc

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RE: [gentoo-alpha] Gentoo Alpha questions

[Donsbach, Jeff]

Marc Giger wrote:
On Sat, 06 Mar 2004 10:14:27 -0500
Jean-Sébastien Guay <jean_seb@videotron.ca> wrote:

>> Hi everyone,
>> 
>> Thanks for the answers. There are two other things I wanted to know...
>> 
>> 1. Did anyone with a milo-only machine (like my Alpha XL-366) have 
>> trouble booting from the LiveCD? I was never able to boot from the 
>> Debian installation CD, and had to start the installation from 
>> diskettes...
>
> Jeff? 

Yes, I believe I did have a problem with the LiveCD. It hung while loading ther kernel. I suspect that the kernel on the LiveCD was not built with the "lagacy_start_address" option needed for MILO machines. I'm not sure about that though. I also have not tried the new LiveCD image that Jay put up for download last week.

>> 
>> 2. Are there often problems compiling stuff like what Jeff talked 
>> about in his message? I would hate my server to be down for a day/week 
>> because some new version of an essential daemon (like exim, sshd,
>> apache) refused to compile.
>>
>I think you got a wrong impression. It's rather an exception that a package can not be compiled.
> ALL ebuilds which are marked stable are stable especially on alpha (mistakes happens).

The only package giving me problems so far is Samba. I had been trying 2.2.8a, the one currently marked stable. I tried both with and without USE="-cups". It didn't make a difference. I still got the include conflicts. I just tried Samba 3 and got the same thing during emerge -

Compiling dynconfig.c
In file included from /usr/include/linux/vfs.h:4,
                 from /usr/include/linux/fs.h:14,
                 from /usr/include/linux/capability.h:17,
                 from /usr/include/sys/capability.h:35,
                 from include/includes.h:355,
                 from dynconfig.c:21:
/usr/include/asm/statfs.h:12: error: redefinition of `struct statfs'
make: *** [dynconfig.o] Error 1

!!! ERROR: net-fs/samba-3.0.2a failed.
!!! Function src_compile, Line 171, Exitcode 2
!!! SAMBA pieces

Jeff D

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RE: [gentoo-alpha] Gentoo Alpha questions

[Jean-Sébastien Guay]

Hello Jay,

> Which LiveCD?

The Gentoo-alpha LiveCD, as found at <any gentoo
mirror>/experimental/alpha/livecd/

> In general, you will not be able to boot from a Gentoo LiveCD directly
with
> ARC/AlphaBIOS. You'll have to use MILO from a floppy. I don't believe
it's
> possible to make a CD bootable for both SRM and ARC.

Ok, that's what I tought from my experience with Debian. So what is the
preferred installation method then? Start from a separate partition of
my existing Debian installation?

> I didn't have any problems compiling stuff when I brought up my
Gentoo/Alpha
> box a month or so ago. 

That's good news.

> I did have to do 
> ACCEPT_KEYWORDS='~alpha' emerge <package>
> several times, but I won't have to do that again, because Aron was
good
> enoguh to mark everything I installed and am running as stable in
response
> to my bug reports. :-)

Err, what does that mean? Sorry for being a neophyte, but
"ACCEPT_KEYWORDS='~alpha' emerge <package>" doesn't mean anything to
me... :-)

J-S

________________________________________________
Jean-Sébastien Guay        jean_seb@videotron.ca
                  http://whitestar02.webhop.org/



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RE: [gentoo-alpha] Gentoo Alpha questions

[Jean-Sébastien Guay]

Hi Marc,

> I think you got a wrong impression. It's rather an exception that a
> package can not be compiled. ALL ebuilds which are marked stable are
> stable especially on alpha (mistakes happens).

That's really good news. Sometimes the exceptional cases tend to stand
out more than the routine ones...

Thanks for the reassurance :-)

J-S

________________________________________________
Jean-Sébastien Guay        jean_seb@videotron.ca
                  http://whitestar02.webhop.org/



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Re: [gentoo-alpha] Gentoo Alpha questions

[Jay Maynard]

On Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 02:54:08PM -0500, Donsbach, Jeff wrote:
> Yes, I believe I did have a problem with the LiveCD. It hung while loading
> ther kernel. I suspect that the kernel on the LiveCD was not built with
> the "lagacy_start_address" option needed for MILO machines. I'm not sure
> about that though. I also have not tried the new LiveCD image that Jay put
> up for download last week.

That image has 3 kernels on it: alpha, legacy, and jensen. The legacy kernel
was built with CONFIG_LEGACY_START_ADDR set.

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Re: [gentoo-alpha] Gentoo Alpha questions

[Jay Maynard]

On Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 03:16:38PM -0500, Jean-S?bastien Guay wrote:
> > Which LiveCD?
> The Gentoo-alpha LiveCD, as found at <any gentoo
> mirror>/experimental/alpha/livecd/

Try the test version LiveCD you'll find at
http://www.ibiblio.org/jmaynard/gentoo-alpha-1.4-test2-20040225.zip . You'll
still need to boot MILO from a floppy to run it, but it at least has the
legacy start address option which MILO needs defined. There are also
corresponding stage tarballs at stage[123]-alpha-20040225.tar.bz2 in the
same directory.

> > In general, you will not be able to boot from a Gentoo LiveCD directly
> > with ARC/AlphaBIOS. You'll have to use MILO from a floppy. I don't
> > believe it's possible to make a CD bootable for both SRM and ARC.
> Ok, that's what I tought from my experience with Debian. So what is the
> preferred installation method then? Start from a separate partition of
> my existing Debian installation?

If your Debian installation is running a 2.4 kernel, that will work fine.
Otherwise, you need to build MILO on a floppy for your platform, boot it
from ARC, then use the MILO command line to boot the kernel off the CD. Look
at the /etc/aboot.conf file on the CD for the options you need to pass to
the kernel. It's been long enough since I've booted with MILO that I can't
be a lot more specific than that.

> > I did have to do 
> > ACCEPT_KEYWORDS='~alpha' emerge <package>
> > several times, but I won't have to do that again, because Aron was good
> > enoguh to mark everything I installed and am running as stable in
> > response to my bug reports. :-)
> Err, what does that mean? Sorry for being a neophyte, but
> "ACCEPT_KEYWORDS='~alpha' emerge <package>" doesn't mean anything to
> me... :-)

The command you use to install a package on Gentoo is "emerge <package>". By
default, unless you've altered the /etc/make.conf file as the install doc
mentions, you'll only install those versions of packages, and those
packages, that are marked as stable. Unstable or untested packages are
marked with a leading ~ on the name of the architecture. Adding
"ACCEPT_KEYWORDS='~alpha'" (without the "") at the beginning of the command
passes the ACCEPT_KEYWORDS environment variable to the emerge program, and
setting that value to ~alpha tells emerge to consider unstable versions of
the packages to be installed when deciding what to install.

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Re: [gentoo-alpha] Gentoo Alpha questions

[Marc Giger]

Good Morning Jeff, All

> The only package giving me problems so far is Samba. I had been trying
> 2.2.8a, the one currently marked stable. I tried both with and without
> USE="-cups". It didn't make a difference. I still got the include
> conflicts. I just tried Samba 3 and got the same thing during emerge -
> 
> Compiling dynconfig.c
> In file included from /usr/include/linux/vfs.h:4,
>                  from /usr/include/linux/fs.h:14,
>                  from /usr/include/linux/capability.h:17,
>                  from /usr/include/sys/capability.h:35,
>                  from include/includes.h:355,
>                  from dynconfig.c:21:
> /usr/include/asm/statfs.h:12: error: redefinition of `struct statfs'
> make: *** [dynconfig.o] Error 1
> 
> !!! ERROR: net-fs/samba-3.0.2a failed.
> !!! Function src_compile, Line 171, Exitcode 2
> !!! SAMBA pieces

What comes in my mind: 

Do you have installed linux-headers-2.4.21 and rebuild your glibc?

Some times ago, gentoo updated the kernel headers and that implies
a rebuild of glibc (to be on the save side).

greets

Marc

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RE: [gentoo-alpha] Gentoo Alpha questions

[Donsbach, Jeff]

Thanks for the hint Marc. I will look at that tonight and give it a try.

-----Original Message-----
From: Marc Giger [mailto:gigerstyle@gmx.ch] 
Sent: Sunday, March 07, 2004 1:39 AM
To: gentoo-alpha@lists.gentoo.org
Subject: Re: [gentoo-alpha] Gentoo Alpha questions


Good Morning Jeff, All

What comes in my mind: 

Do you have installed linux-headers-2.4.21 and rebuild your glibc?

Some times ago, gentoo updated the kernel headers and that implies a
rebuild of glibc (to be on the save side).

greets

Marc

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