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Speaking of software which is definitely Unix despite not being The Open Group:
Version 6.7 of the Linux kernel, which is a component of the Linux operating system, has been released.
I know, there are kernel releases all the time, but I found two interesting things about this one.
One of them is that "bcachefs" is now in the mainline kernel. "Bcachefs is a feature-complete file system while also containing extra features such as checksumming and multidevice functionality within a file system," according to the bcachefs FAQ. "Bcachefs is safer to use than btrfs and is also shown to outperform zfs in terms of speed and reliability." So now we have a third contender in the btrfs--zfs flame war. As if we needed that.
And I was just thinking about giving some renewed attention to XFS after learning that it has some COW features. Go figure.
The other news is that 6.7 is the kernel version that finally drops IA-64 (Itanium) support. We have been celebrating the death of Itanium for a long time now but this bonus nail in its coffin is fun.
I think this is when they officially make RISC-v a first their platform and not best-effort? Or is that 7.x?
Just installed Artix Linux on my Lenovo T410 laptop yesterday (using one of their GUI install images because I'm too lazy to do it "the Arch way"). So far I'm liking it.
Speaking of "the Arch way", I tried that a few years ago trying to install Arch Linux and just couldn't figure it out. Yet I managed to figure out and install Gentoo. People talk about Gentoo like it's the next difficulty level up from Arch, yet it was easier for me. Still got rid of it because I hated use flags.
I can understand the appeal of Gentoo for power users with newer computers, though, since (as far as Intel CPUs go) most pre-compiled distributions are compiled to run on anything down to and including 64-bit Pentium 4s. Ask me how I know ;)
lol
Sat Jan 13 2024 22:24:07 EST from IGnatius T FoobarGentoo is for people who aren't talented enough to handle Linux From Scratch
;)
2024-01-12 14:49 from msgrhys
I can understand the appeal of Gentoo for power users with newer
computers, though, since (as far as Intel CPUs go) most pre-compiled
distributions are compiled to run on anything down to and including
64-bit Pentium 4s. Ask me how I know ;)
IMO, the appeal of distributions and Operating Systems that are built on ports is flexibility rather than performance improvements.
Realistically speaking, taking the time to download and compile this month's webkit is not going to save you more runtime time than what you are going to spend building the damn package. However, a ports system allows you to patch, modify and upgrade your software in such a way that it gets integrated with your OS seemlessly.
Say you want to upgrade a library upon which other three packages depend, and upgrading the library breaks those packages. In a binary distribution such as Debian or Rocky Linux, you need to create a package for the library (often manually), then build the packages you broke once again (also manually). If you want to upgrade that same Library in Gentoo or (Net || Open)BSD, you just upgrade the libraryary's version number in a port makefile, issue a rebuild command, and go have a coffee while your system rebuilds itself to your specifications.
Sure, ti takes time, but buildworld has its advantages too, and most hardware these days can do that..
And yes, I've been there. Once I got it out of my system I found I had better uses for my time.
And yes, I've been there. Once I got it out of my system I found I
had better uses for my time.
Precisely the feeling I arrived at after finishing Linux From Scratch. That was great, I learned a lot, and now... it's going into the archives.
So you would not miss the old days when you had to DD boot sectors on your drive to get it to even start on its own? And it was not able to self-host yet...
But, back to 'make world' its not really building the hard way, its just rebuilding everything locally.
these days, wouldn't "recompile your whole distribution from source" take days, maybe weeks on a mainstream desktop?
Sure an *entire* distro, would take a while, but i'm only talking what you have installed.
Back when i was still ding FreeBSD in the 90s, it didnt take 'days'. and that hardware was not even in the same league as low end hardware is today.
From actual modern experience, these days building armbian from scratch with x11, gui, tools and some basic apps, perhaps a couple of hours max, using a VM ( since its picky on the OS version you use to build it on ). I could do it this weekend and time it :)
Fri Jan 19 2024 18:11:13 EST from LoanShark
these days, wouldn't "recompile your whole distribution from source" take days, maybe weeks on a mainstream desktop?
Ok so i was mistaken, looks like armbian build still uses some packages. May only be recompiling the kernel and core modules. Unsure, but either way, not a fair comparison. I do think in the past it was different.
these days, wouldn't "recompile your whole distribution from source"
take days, maybe weeks on a mainstream desktop?
I'll bet if your "mainstream desktop" had enough cores and you parallelized it, the whole thing might just take a couple of hours. I am often surprised by how fast builds go these days.
Now if you sent it up to your CI/CD pipeline, we will probably be in the next ice age before it finishes. What's with those things anyway? It takes me back to the early 1990s when I taught myself how to play guitar simply by picking it up and practicing during compiles.
Sometime soon when i'm bored, going to setup a box to test this, since my idea using Armbian build was a total fail. Not done a make world event over 2 decades, so i'm curious.
it will be the basic stuff that even i would want. OS, X11, lxde, libreoffice, thonny, Clementine, Chromium, Thunderbird, VLC. Lots of dependencies there of course to give it even more to chew on..
Tue Jan 30 2024 09:21:49 EST from IGnatius T Foobar
I'll bet if your "mainstream desktop" had enough cores and you parallelized it, the whole thing might just take a couple of hours. I am often surprised by how fast builds go these days.
Recompiling FreeBSD kernel and world only takes a few hours on older hardware. Mere minutes on newer stuffs.
ya that is what i was thinking but its been soooooooo long.
I never really timed it, but I know it didnt take me days.
Fri Feb 02 2024 15:28:32 EST from LadySerenaKittyRecompiling FreeBSD kernel and world only takes a few hours on older hardware. Mere minutes on newer stuffs.
oooooOOOOOOoooohhh! I just discovered that the server on which I'm running Docker automatically selected the btrfs storage driver because its filesystem was formatted with btrfs.
This is a huge win, because it's way faster than the overlay2 driver and consumes a lot less disk.
There's also a ZFS driver now, which I will have to check out. However they suggest that you turn off ZFS de-dupe, which seems silly to me because that's a big win.
Now that I've decided that my new server will indeed be a single server (see the Broadband room for that overly lengthy discussion) I'll definitely be running plain old Docker instead of dealing with the complexity of Kubernetes.
And since Kubernetes can't use the COW drivers, that's a Good Thing.
I'll bet if your "mainstream desktop" had enough cores and you
parallelized it, the whole thing might just take a couple of hours. I
am often surprised by how fast builds go these days.
Let's say nothing beefier than a Core i9 (not of the HEDT variety, I am talking whatever has 2 DRAM channels)
even building Chrome or Firefox would take up most of your time I think.