Helium Sources (kernel patchset)

[dusanc]

Will it ever get in an overlay?
I'm lazy
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Reiser4 Gentoo FAQ [11Jun2011]

[hirakendu]

Nope, not in near future. I am lazy too . (I do maintain a personal portage "overlay" for me, which you may browse here and download as an archive, but that would be complicating things further.) Aside, given its simplicity, you should not require it.
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Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd

[hirakendu]

While this shouldn't bother anyone, I added a temporary small patch that _backports_ the asus-wmi (and eeepc-wmi) driver from 2.6.39-rc7 to 2.6.38. The patch will be removed from 2.6.39 onwards. The temporary ebuild is here.

(Details: I required it for getting to work the special keyboard buttons on my new Asus G53SW notebook. With this patch, only volume control buttons work. Touchpad and keyboard backlight buttons still don't work. Fortunately, the button that enables and disables all lights on the notebook can be used to control the keyboard backlighting - brightness is always full. May need to enable it once by booting into Windows. For the display brightness, when using the proprietary nvidia driver, adding a line or two to xorg.conf is sufficient. Aside, for a good command-line utility for configuring external monitors and projectors on nvidia gpu's on the fly, consider the excellent utility called "disper", with ebuild here.)
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Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd

[hirakendu]

A preliminary version of 2.6.39-helium0 is available. Reiser4 support will be added when available upstream. Also, 2.6.39* could be the last of helium-sources as I keep getting busier .
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Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd

[hirakendu]

As I indicated previously, I am pretty much discontinuing helium-sources. Mostly because the very few extra patches and features that I was interested in, are now present in vanilla (i.e., mainline) kernel or discontinued themselves. Specifically,
1. Reiser4 as I understand is not actively maintained for the newer kernels
2. Squashfs is now in mainline
3. Aufs although not in mainline (and apparently will never be), is easy to include in a kernel, either according to the instructions on aufs website, or using the aufs package in gentoo's portage to get as module. Moreover, it is mostly useful for people interested in "livecd" images.
4. About tuxonice, it seems the suspend/hibernate features in mainline kernel are sufficient for most machines, hence no longer important anymore. I have had success in suspending (to ram) all my machines using the mainline suspend features along with the excellent pm-utils package. Also see the notes below for more information.
5. Fbcondecor patch can be obtained (and was pulled) from gentoo-sources.

I would be still maintaining helium-sources whenever time permits and/or I get an itch for a new kernel version, but it is safe to not rely on it anymore. The current version is 3.1 (patch, ebuild and broken-out). Future versions 3.x if any, would be available at http://hirakendu.mooo.com/helium-sources/3.x/, and it is best to use the ebuild after renaming it suitably to helium-sources-3.x.y.ebuild.

Some notes about this version:
1. Primarly provides aufs and fbcondecor.
2. As mentioned above, tuxonice has been removed. The included config has support for the mainline suspend features. The usb modules ehci-hcd and xhci-hcd has been compiled in as modules to allow for suspend to work on machines with USB 3.0 support -- this is to workaround the bug that currently xhci has problems with sleep. It also means that these two modules should be included in a initramfs if booting from a usb drive. The suspend to ram (sleep) feature has been tested to work perfectly on my machines using pm-utils package (the command pm-suspend and kde sleep buttons) -- namely on an Asus G53SW notebook (intel core i7 2630qm, nvidia gtx460m, and has usb 3.0), and an Acer Iconia W500 tablet (amd fusion c-50). Sleep works with both proprietary nvidia, ati graphics drivers and opensource nouveau,radeon drivers.
3. Also added a patch for rts5139 driver for the Realtek 5139 (0bda:0139 in lsusb) usb-bus internal card reader, present on the Asus g53 notebook - should be in mainline in later kernels. (The fact that now all my hardware works perfectly with this kernel was another factor to discontinue helium-sources. )
4. For opensource radeon graphics driver (with kms and 3d acceleration), the kernel config expects the radeon-ucode or linux-firmware package to be installed. Please note that the line in the included kernel config containing CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE was generated using the bash command

[Skotlex]

Thanks for your continuous support while this package lasted :)

I also switched back to gentoo-sources, since
- hibernate to ram is enough for me
- Reiser4 seems dead, and btrfs is at a state where I consider it an adequate replacement (in any case, R4 was far too buggy in the very last kernel versions, so I am in a habit of backing up weekly now)
- framebuffer fbcondecor patches are already in Gentoo-sources

Isn't it better when everything we need is popular enough to be included in the mainline kernel? :P

[hirakendu]

@Skotlex, should thank you for being one of the two (or three) people who used this package, and for all your feedback and support .

Indeed, you get the idea. If these few features were in mainline (and I believe they should have), I would have been happy at first place and I wouldn't create yet another custom patchset. Thankfully, some of these have indeed been incorporated in mainline. Not just kernel, for any package, I believe features should be maintained upstream whenever possible, and I am not a big fan of forks or custom builds. If some features conflict, either the best one should be kept, or others should be kept as options if any one doesn't fit all.

As far as filesystem goes, if I haven't mentioned earlier, long time ago I used reiser 3.6. I never used reiser4, either as root or for my data -- never felt confident enough. Eventually, to enable access from Windows and OSX, I had shifted to ext3 -- thanks to the excellent extfsd and fuse-ext2 projects. Moreover, ext3 was pretty standard, well supported, stable and good enough for my purposes. It was a bit space and possibly performance inefficient compared to reiser 3.6, but hardware(cpu, bus speeds) got better and hard drives got larger. Ext3 itself has also improved. I just use ext4 for my root filesystem since it has trim (discard option) for SSD's. I don't think I would ever need to try out another filesystem again, nor would I have the time . I would love to see a enterprise-desktop grade filesystem with most features as zfs and multiplatform support, in particular if it is ext or btrfs. I think Oracle can and should do this with btrfs, given that they have zfs (and they are doing a good job in general).
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Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd