Help PLZ

Matthew Hawkins matthew at topic.com.au
Tue Aug 28 21:30:47 EST 2001


On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
> Well, apt-get -b will do that also, although I think it's more likely that
> the proxy will have the .deb than the tarball.

This was my point.  The original source tarball is identical on all
platforms, however the srpm bundles it in a cpio archive, source .deb
bundles it in an ar archive, and so on - and what gets downloaded is
this archive.  I'm proposing that these should really just contain the
platform-specific build bits, and the original source tarball get
fetched separately.  This way every system can share the original source
tarball hopefully cached in (eg Telstra's) proxy cache network.
There should also be a method of specifying exactly where the original
source tarball can be fetched from (FreeBSD ports does this) so you can
point the build/upgrade/install process at for example a local mirror.

Think of a network containing a mix of Linux distributions,
Free/Net/OpenBSD, Solaris, MacOS X, etc. all of which run (eg GNU)
software.  Why waste time/bandwidth pulling down identical bits when you
can grab it once and everyone benefits?

Now, you can argue that this isn't optimal (eg, you could have a
situation where you don't, or rather can't, compile from source) however
I think this is a real minority case.  Eg sure, you don't want compiler
tools on your router just so you can keep it updated, but who has a
router and not some system behind it capable of compiling things for the
router?

> I havn't had the kernel oops on me in a very long time. What were you doing?

Booting.  It happened at random times during boot (not one particular
driver at fault), happened with all kernels tried (not one particular
kernel, or kernel series even, at fault).  2.2.17 lasted the longest
from memory (ie, would even get past starting init and could run for a
random amount of time), but eventually died also.

It's hardware related, the only thing I can note is that the LED
readouts on the motherboard indicating system status read fine when it
boots both BSD's and Win2k (remember, Diablo 2 isn't just a game, its a
way of life ;) however the Linux kernels tried started okay but went
wonky - ie the kernel wasn't really setting the system up right.

I have 9Gb spare on the disk (thinking of making it a core dump
partition for FreeBSD [hey, that's another cool feature I forgot about])
and I'd like to try the latest 2.4.10 or 2.4.9-ac which addresses
related issues with the main chip on this board, but I haven't had the
time.

> Also, how on earth does BSD get smaller binaries that linux? I mean, they
> use the same toolchain (gcc) and the same executable format (ELF) so where
> can there possibly be a difference?

libc, in the same way Linux libc5 binaries are smaller than Linux glibc2
binaries.


On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Damien Elmes wrote:
> apt-get source -b package 

You're forgiven :-)  See comments above.  As for pentium-builder, doesn't
really help much if you don't have a pentium ;)  In any case I can set
CFLAGS manually...

On the subject of optimisation, see the comment in the make.conf file
for FreeBSD saying "only use -O to compile the kernel"?  Believe it ;)
I did the Athlon optimisation options, and even if I made it -O instead
of -O3, the system would be unstable.  All the other things did was
change the alignments of various bits, if I had time I'd gcc -S with
both settings and try to figure out why the change makes the system
screwy.

> this is nifty. i'm about to try out ext3 actually, it's backwards
> compatible with ext2, can be added to an existing ext2 filesystem, and
> just looks cool :-)

It's posting some pretty nice benchmarks as well recently.  At home
(where Linux runs just fine thanks :)  I'm going to have a play with
that and XFS and JFS, but first I've got to change it from lilo to grub,
and I've been meaning to do that for a while... enough time to post to
CLUG list, not enough time to actually run Linux at home ;)
I already have reiserfs on it, and it works great, but as they say a
change is as good as a holiday ;)

-- 
Matt




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