Helium Sources (kernel patchset)

[hirakendu]

Here goes 2.6.30-helium0 : patch, broken-out and precompiled.

No really important/interseting notes this time. Please look into broken-out for any circumstantial evidence . (Oh, and I have dropped the patch for including dsdt files in initramfs - looks like no upstream support. I will look into including it from Mandriva's patches sometime later if I find time. However, most people shouldn't need it as linux acpi is really good these days and only a few bad old notebooks may require it imho. If really required, one may recompile their kernel with the dsdt file path in kernel config, as is the standard method.)

Btw, I have not really tested this one really well. Just compiled and booted. Looks OK. (I have a conference to attend soon, so will start using 2.6.30 only after July 10 or so.)
_________________
Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd

[punloh]

You seem to have forgotten to include the LZF compression support into 2.6.30-helium0. It's required to speed up tuxonice.

[hirakendu]

If I remember correctly, lzf option was dropped from tuxonice sometime back. Please have a look here.
_________________
Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd

[punloh]

[hirakendu]

Usual update, 2.6.31-helium0: patch, broken-out and precompiled.

Contains reiser4-for-2.6.30 (not .31 atm), aufs2-git-20090914, tuxonice-2.6.31-20090911, fbcondecor-0.9.6-2.6.30.
_________________
Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd

[Skotlex]

Please update, the Reiser4 patches for 2.6.31 are now available ;)

[hirakendu]

I do keep it updated. I had the upstream 2.6.31 reiser4 patch since quite some time (after they were released and some issues were worked out). Whenever in doubt, you can look at the broken-out/ folder to see if things have changed. Sorry, I do hope to maintain a changelog sometime. Thanks for dropping by .

PS: Also, you may have a look at zen-sources, which are in portage now.
_________________
Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd

[hirakendu]

I have put up a rather experimental version of 2.6.32-helium0. Everything except reiser4 is all good. Please don't use this if using reiser4. Waiting for upstream reiser4 updates. So far looks like another good kernel as usual.
_________________
Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd

[hirakendu]

updated.
_________________
Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd

[Skotlex]

Wow, thanks!
I thought there was not going to be Reiser4 for 2.6.32... well this will make the wait for 2.6.33 easier :D

[hirakendu]

Usual update, 2.6.33-helium0: patch, broken-out and precompiled.

Contains reiser4-mmtom, aufs2-git-20091130, tuxonice-3.0.99.48-20100209, fbcondecor-0.9.6-2.6.33-rc7. Tested OK .

@Skotlex: Now you don't have to wait . And you shouldn't thank me, but Edward Shishkin and co who maintain reiser4. Also thanks to this thread for pointing out the upstream release.
_________________
Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd

[Skotlex]

Hmm...
I just noticed that Edward released the official Reiser4 patch for 2.6.33. How does it compares to the ones in the mmtom? Should the Helium Sources patchset be update to use this?

@hirakendu: Still, I say thanks for providing just what I need. An easy to use, small-patchset that has just what I needed =P

[hirakendu]

@ Skotlex: Thanks for notifying. Updated to use reiser4 from upstream. Aside, I can see you may want reiser4, tuxonice and fbcondecor on top of vanilla, but do you use aufs?
_________________
Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd

[Skotlex]

Actually... I stopped using TuxOnIce a while ago. I saw no need to keep a separate swap partition just for that when I don't even use swap (3GB of Ram is more than enough for my needs).

I don't know what aufs is, these days I only use reiser4 and fbcondecor. Though I do think most "everybody" (at least laptop users) wants fbcondecor and tuxonice. Wonder why these two projects don't just make it into the tree already...

[hirakendu]

Well, if you need tuxonice, you might be aware that you can use a swap file, instead of a separate partition. Details are here. Aside, I do not use hibernate at all. (Have had bad experiences with Windows screwing up my hardware long long time ago, let alone Linux. Besides, booting is fast, rest of the time it is suspend to ram.) Also, I do create a swap file on some partition when I really require it. (For example, I have an old machine with 1 GB RAM which runs out of memory when I unsquashfs a large squashfs filesystem.)

Aufs is "another unionfs" and I use it for building live disks of my system (in conjunction with squashfs). I do not use reiser4 at all. I used to use Reiser 3.6 as my default filesystem and it is very efficient, but shifted to ext3, thanks to people who wrote drivers for it in Windows and Mac (although I hardly use them). I do use fbcondecor and gensplash.

Tuxonice might never get into mains - one of those eternal debated issues I guess, as is the case with Con Kolivas's innovative schedulers and Reiser4. Not sure fbcondecor will make it either (nor is it aimed at?). It seems that currently each distro has its own fine working way of splash during boot up.
_________________
Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd

[Skotlex]

TuxOnIce's support for the filewriter plugin is pretty bad. When I tried it before, it was impossible to create a file! I filed a bug report and they didn't fix it for half a year! :P Also, it gets tricky because TOI wants direct access into the disk before mounting the filesystem, and as you can imagine, TOI doesn't has that good support for reading directly of a Reiser4 filesystem.

I am probably going to stick to Reiser4 for another year or so before deciding to switch to BTRFS (waiting for it to at least get its format finalized), though I am not sure how good are the data integrity mechanisms for it. R4 was advertised for its atomicity of transactions, so that the data was as best protected as possible during crashes while writing files (unlike my previous favourite, XFS, who was fond of leaving me with 0-sized files, really sucks that this is "expected" POSIX-compliant behaviour >_>). That, together with good performance numbers places it as my best FS candidate for the time being.

BtrFS has a lot of features and development push, but how good is the data integrity on it? I know it has checksums, but this only protects against hardware induced errors, not crash-related ones. Still, I may change to it if R4 never quite makes it into the kernel (after all, it is the only other FS I know that also supports compression, which is a big issue for me).

Despite it's claimed stability over Windows, Linux still freezes/crashes "often enough" that it's suicide to not consider "safety" when crashing during writes.

Ah well, such is the way of Linux. Either let your distribution handle all the minor gripes, or you have to handle them yourself!

[hirakendu]

@Skotlex:

Looks like I forgot to reply then as I was busy.

Yes, it could be that TOI can't deal with Reiser4, I am not sure. But I think in general Reiser4 is not a good idea for anything other than experimentation. It breaks too often (or rather the linux kernel breaks it - I wish it was upstream). Lesser developers/maintainers and people with insight into it. And less tested - I don't bother much about speed as much about stability. Also wish it had support from grub and other os'es.

I think btrfs will take a little more time to mature. I'll try it sometime next year I guess, and hopefully there will be support in grub and windows and fuse by then.

But on the issue of stability, I would say that Linux be may be a bit slow here and there, but does not crash except for once in a blue moon (and to be fair, nor does Windows or Mac OS). The only system crashes I can remember in recent past are those that happen occasionally after resuming from suspend on my notebook. Application crashes are by and large limited to browser crashes due to flash or acroread, or a rare nvidia (proprietary) driver crash. But my desktops / workstations have been running for almost a year (and they are still running 2.6.29 from last August when I last updated and rebooted them). I believe a lot has to do with good hardware and external conditions (like power line quality and weather etc).
_________________
Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd

[hirakendu]

There is 2.6.34-helium0 without reiser4 and tuxonice for now - will add them when released upstream. Which therefore means that it contains nothing more except aufs and fbcondecor as of now.

And possibly the patchset will be discontinued whenever unionfs/aufs makes it into the kernel (which I am surprised is still not the case, though virtually every distribution uses it in their live disks). Gentoo sources contain fbcondecor (and hopefully might be replaced sometime by plymouth / xsplash etc).
_________________
Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd

[Skotlex]

Well, I see the reiser4 patch for 2.6.34 in Edward's site. When it is there it automatically means this is the recommended, stable release?

Since I am not following R4's story, I just use the filesystem. :P

EDIT: Uhm, I better get ready for whenever this patchset stops being updated. So, where would I normally get the fbcondecor patches from? Spock's website seems rather outdated... is the project dead or something? o_O

[hirakendu]

Hi. Thanks a lot for pointing out. I'll update things early in the weekend. (Busy with big Friday.)
_________________
Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd

[hirakendu]

2.6.34-helium0: patch, broken-out and precompiled.

Contains reiser4 (upstream), aufs2 (git-20100517), tuxonice (git-20100529), fbcondecor (0.9.6-2.6.33-rc7 + fix). All tested OK.

@ Skotlex:

1. You are ready as of now, since there is no original work in this patchset. But it should exist till I use Linux and Gentoo (which is forever) and few essential things are out of tree which require some effort to include.

2. As long as reiser4 is available upstream, I'll include it. Usually if it is not pushed out by upstream (i.e., Edward) soon, I try to pull from mm tree, but this time it was marked broken and so there was no point in merging, let alone any fixing. Fortunately, it was released upstream soon as you reported. (And I do check for trivial mounts/unmounts, copy/delete etc even though I don't use reiser4.)

3. I don't think fbcondecor is dead. I think it is stable, hence doesn't require any more tinkering. For example, this time I just had to trivially add the header <linux/slab.h> which is required for functions like kmalloc(), kfree() etc starting from 2.6.34. I was just saying that it could be replaced by _standard_ and potentially better splash packages like plymouth from fedora and ubuntu, that support kms and are almost seamless. (I am not sure if there are plans for fbcondecor to support kms instead of vesa and uvesa - I guess it already does. I am also not sure if there are plans to make plymouth work with openrc.)
_________________
Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd

[Hwoarang]

Is there a bug open for Helium Sources? Any ebuild to use?

[hirakendu]

Nope, no ebuild and no bug. And possibly there won't be any for now.
_________________
Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd

[Skotlex]

So, kernel 2.6.35 has been out for around a week, and just today the Reiser4 patch for it has been released.

Can we get a new release now, please? ;)

[hirakendu]

Yes, I'll put up a patch soon, hopefully by tonight or tomorrow. Things have been happening quicker than I thought, and I am a little busy with my academics right now.

Thanks for using helium-sources.
_________________
Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd