New notebook, questions on swap and booting

[Gentlenoob]

Hi all,

I finally got myself a new HP laptop (labeled 14-MA1311NG). It comes with Windows 10 Home preinstalled. Of course I want it to run Gentoo, preferably in a dual boot setup alongside with Windows.

So far things look ok'ish. Without much hassle I've been able to liberate enough disk space, boot the minimal install ISO from USB-stick (secure boot turned off), connect to LAN (luckily, this box still got a RJ-45) and play around with fdisk, parted, mkfs.* and the likes. The only slowdown is myself tiptoeing around, since my last install was on legacy hardware 7 years ago. In particular I've got to catch up on (U)EFI, booting options and a bit of partitioning, so here it goes:

* How much swap do I need? The box has got 16 GB RAM, so I'd guess it's rarely needed, but what about hibernation? I've not yet found a straightforward answer. I'd opt for 16 GB swap, i.e. same as RAM size, but that's just gut feeling.

* How do I best setup booting? As said, I'd like to dual boot with Windows. Is this case implicitly covered by the handbooks "Default:GRUB2" section? I.e. is windows still bootable once I've performed the steps mentioned there, in particular 'grub-install', which, if I'm not mistaken, modifies the EFI system partition? When googling for dual boot, I only seem to find the "direct" UEFI boot variant with stub kernel and without grub or other bootloader in between. However this method seems to have its own caveats, e.g. boot command line to be compiled in the kernel and not easily modifiable.

Thanks a lot for some clarifying remarks, pointers and hints
Ralph

[wokko]

With swap on 16G you can either do half or equal if you want to hibernate
With booting you use windows uefi partition (need to mount it before you run your grub commands) for grubs/gentoo efi image
The hand book covers it for grub/uefi https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AMD64/Installation/Bootloader#Install
Just make sure you have os-prober installed

[Hu]

For hibernation, you need sufficient swap space that every useful page of RAM can be written to swap during hibernation, so that you can restore everything when you resume. A page is "useful" if it contains data that cannot be recreated from some other source. Mapped copies of program text can be reread from disk. Pages used for caching data loaded from disk can be reread. Application data cannot, so it must be saved. The number of useful pages varies over time and as a function of how you use the system. I have a system where I can hibernate with everything open, unless Firefox has been used to view certain poorly written webapps, in which case Firefox has bloated up so far that I can't page out everything. In those cases, closing Firefox before hibernation frees enough memory that I can hibernate successfully.

[Fitzcarraldo]

[rpruen]

I recently installed a new laptop, a HP 255 G6

My thinking for the swap was to allocate as much as the machine can have RAM (16GB in my case), though only 4 GB is fitted yet. Allowing to hibernate the machine to disk even if you have filled up the memory slots. Its a small fraction of the 1TB drive.

As for installing on UEFI that went smoothly following the manual, you need to mount the EFI partition before installing Grub2. You can choose either to have grub boot windows, or choose to keep the option within the UEFI boot manager. I have only Gentoo on the laptop so don't use that feature.


Hope it goes smoothly for you

Regards

Richard

[Gentlenoob]

Thanks to all of you! Progress is slow right now as I haven't much spare time. So I'll play it safe and stick with 16 GB swap. Indeed I missed that os-prober remark in the handbook and will look into it.

Cheers, Ralph

[Gentlenoob]

Hi again,

still not much spare time for real progress. I did some more googling on UEFI and dual booting, but don't get it yet. So please bear with me and share some more of your knowledge.

Right now, without having meddled with grub or any other boot-/uefi-tools yet, there's the UEFI firmware, which acts as a bootloader (NB: I'm not on solid grounds with terminology either). I.e. after power up, when the screen lits, I can press ESC, which brings up a simple text-menu, which offers to boot Windows, or USB, or enter the BIOS (and few more items I forgot). Without ESC pressed, it boots up Windows after a few seconds. All this is as expected and fine with me.

Now, what will happen once I'll install Grub according to the handbook? 'emerge grub; emerge os-prober' won't do any harm as I read it. But the next steps along

[rpruen]

[Prof. Frink]

If you have 16 GB of RAM, you do not need a SWAP, from my point of view. I have 32 GB and do not use a swap for some reasons on my system. But usually I would suggest 1.25*(GB of RAM) = GB swap.

[Hu]

[Prof. Frink]

[Gentlenoob]

... just a short update: As Richard and others suggested, my reservations around booting were mostly unfounded. Going by the handbook, grub2 (which until now I had avoided, and which I still have mixed feelings about) seems to do the right thing and I'm now happily dual-booting Gentoo and Windows. Let's hope it stays that way after the next Windows-update.

WiFi seems to work, as well as X, except for the touchpad, which is one of those Elan-I2C devices that seem to need extra attention. So some more rounds of tweaking are due, whenever time permits.

Cheers, Ralph

[Gentlenoob]

... the touchpad took me a while. After playing around for hours with a plethora of elantech, psmouse, smbus, etc. kernel modules, options and parameters, I finally cheated (should have done that much earlier) and booted into the latest ubuntu iso, where the touchpad just worked out of the box.

It seems that the modules I've been missing all the time relate to some i2c_designware driver, for whatever reason. I must admit that I don't really get how ps/2, psaux, smbus, i2c, and whatever are supposed to play together. Here's what finally made the difference for me