~amd64, worth the risk?

Message

BLASTER_ · Post by **BLASTER_** » Sat Mar 04, 2006 5:51 pm

Looking at the size of my package.keywords file.. I'm wondering if I should just move the entire system over to unstable. Last year when I originally installed gentoo on my AMD64, I created a base install image and tested unstable with a backup copy and it wouldn't compile the system.. that made me very nervous.

Will Stable > Unstable compile cleanly now? Just change the mask and "emerge -u system && emerge -u world"?

I have run unstable on x86 and ppc before with reasonably good results.. I like the beta packages and generally and good enough to, if not fix problems, at least get by with them.

!equilibrium · Post by **!equilibrium** » Sat Mar 04, 2006 6:30 pm

BLASTER_ wrote:Will Stable > Unstable compile cleanly now? Just change the mask and "emerge -u system && emerge -u world"?

unstable is not 'another' gentoo profile, is used to test ebuilds before to put it in the x86 branch, so do not use ~x86 unless you know how to fix problems and ebuild mistakes because you'll fight every day with these type of stuff

Icer · Post by **Icer** » Sat Mar 04, 2006 6:51 pm

I generally try to avoid unstable packages. However I just switched into AMD64 and so far I've had to use masked nvidia kernel and bunch of other packages just to get X working. Now installing masked firefox... So IMO it's ok to try out masked packages. If they work no harm done and if they dont just revert to older package.

!equilibrium · Post by **!equilibrium** » Sat Mar 04, 2006 6:54 pm

Icer wrote:I generally try to avoid unstable packages. However I just switched into AMD64 and so far I've had to use masked nvidia kernel and bunch of other packages just to get X working. Now installing masked firefox... So IMO it's ok to try out masked packages. If they work no harm done and if they dont just revert to older package.

using SOME masked ebuilds into a stable profile, it's all ok... using an entire ~x86 system not (all the packages!!); are two different things, and BLASTER_ asked for the second one (if i have understand right)

BLASTER_ · Post by **BLASTER_** » Sat Mar 04, 2006 7:03 pm

Thats right. I have 84 packages unmasked to ~amd64 right now. I have run ~ppc for almost 4 years solid.. sure I've had hair pulling moments but nothing that was a show stopper.

Alright sanity rules the day.. I'll say at so called "stable"

Bluekkis · Post by **Bluekkis** » Sat Mar 04, 2006 9:39 pm

I just reasently switched to ~amd64 and so far it has run just like it did before, except for newest glibc (2.3.6-r3) brakes multilib for me few times I've tryed it so I jsut masked it on packages.mask since -r2 of same works without problems. It is wise to do quickpkg for critical system packages (gcc, glibc, binutils) before making transition, saves a lot of trouble if something actually goes wrong. I had to go through some loops to downgrade glibc since it didn't want to compile anymore with broken multilib as I didn't quickpkg it before hand. Once I manage to finalize my upgrade to dual-core, I'll go deeper with xorg7 and gcc4 as compiling takes bit less time then.

spielc · Post by **spielc** » Sat Mar 04, 2006 11:55 pm

I used a plain amd64-system for quite a while but i changed over to ~amd64 a few months ago and i have to say i don't regret it... Sometimes i do have to solve issues (baselayout mostly, i masked all unstable versions of it because i had so much troubles with it in the past) but in most of the other cases everything runs and compiles smoothly...

I just upgraded to gcc-4.1.0 and am rebuilding the whole system atm and all went smoothly so far

In general it's better to stick to the regular amd64, especially if you are a beginner but you could always give it a try and switch back to regular amd64 if you experience problems you don't think you are able to overcome...

felicehome · Post by **felicehome** » Sun Mar 05, 2006 11:13 am

In general it's better to stick to the regular amd64, especially if you are a beginner but you could always give it a try and switch back to regular amd64 if you experience problems you don't think you are able to overcome...

I doubt, that switching back is that easy. Well I never switched back, because I never felt the need to. But search the forum for this issue.

cheers

xanas3712 · Post by **xanas3712** » Sun Mar 05, 2006 5:07 pm

My keywords file is also huge, but honestly I've had issues with the amount of upgrading that I do. I don't suggest that most people do that unless they just have to have the latest and greatest (which.. I like having that.. lol, but I also realize that I'm an idiot).

At the very least if you start with the base amd64 though at least you'll get a working system to screw up. Then you at least have something that you can default back to if there are issues. If you just start off that way though it may take a long time to get everything working as you want.

sternklang · Post by **sternklang** » Sun Mar 05, 2006 5:22 pm

I think it's more a matter of what you use your system for. I've been running ~amd64 on my desktop since I first switched from FedoraCore to Gentoo last year, and while there has been the occasional problem, nothing has caused major breakage for me yet. On the other hand, if I was setting up a server or running a business off the system, I would consider sticking with stable packages.

I also like testing and helping to find problems early on -- I'm not a coder, but this is my small way of contributing back to the community.

timmy69 · Post by **timmy69** » Sun Mar 05, 2006 5:32 pm

I think that all "~amd64" package set is veeryy unstable but .. to be honest..
gentoo installed in amd64 profile is a way stable than every other distros.. ( except
Debian but Debian isn't for such architectures.. ).. I'm using Gentoo for amd64
and everything works quite fine except of the framebuffer ( don't know why but in
"normal" x86 everything worked great.. ) and a win32codecs..

longship · Post by **longship** » Sun Mar 05, 2006 8:42 pm

I'm playing around with video transcoding and have installed several ~amd64 packages, video libs, transcode, and other related stuff. Whenever I use these programs, my system becomes unstable. No kernel panics, but I get X hangups and total system hangups where even sshd is unavailable.

Using ~amd64 packages is risky.

col · Post by **col** » Sun Mar 05, 2006 10:02 pm

I just did an install of gentoo 2006.0 using ~amd64...everything is working perfectly so far. I was running 2005.1 until multilib broke so there are risks.

Syntaxis · Post by **Syntaxis** » Sun Mar 05, 2006 11:24 pm

timmy69 wrote:gentoo installed in amd64 profile is a way stable than every other distros.. ( except Debian but Debian isn't for such architectures.. )

Debian does support AMD64, as documented on http://www.debian.org/ports/amd64/.

It's branded "unofficial" due to its being located somewhere other than the Debian master server, nothing else. AMD64-specific bugs are considered release-critical under the same terms as for the other seven "official" architectures, the port's own Sarge release is officially supported by the Debian security team on the same terms as the "official" architectures, and the port already actively tracks the Unstable and Testing distributions for those that wish to run them.

Incidentally, the mirror split which was blocking AMD64's inclusion is now finally almost complete. Once it's finished, AMD64 will at long last be added to the master archive (most likely together with other unreleased ports such as ppc64 and mipseb which are, like AMD64, currently in the unfortunate situation of having to maintain their own separate infrastructure). Said mirror split will also open up neat possibilities such as having the archive updated more than once daily (the benefits of which are discussed here) and perhaps making backports.org and volatile.debian.net officially supported parts of the archive, all of which would be pretty cool.

cynric · Post by **cynric** » Mon Mar 06, 2006 3:55 am

I too run ~amd64 and have since Oct of 2004. I can't say that I've run into anything that crippled me. Rarely you hit something, but it's generally not specifc to amd64. That's strictly what I've experienced anyway although I know of a few incidents that were quite bad. I also run a bit of p.mask stuff such as gcc-4.0.2 and Xorg-7.0. Even with a "healthy" set of CFLAGS and LDFLAGS. Again, no real issues with those either. Of course, as always, YMMV.

Sheepdogj15 · Post by **Sheepdogj15** » Wed Mar 08, 2006 2:33 am

what i'd do is set up a second partition, and play with ~amd64 there. if you like it convert the stable install over. in fact, this thread got me to thinking i may just do that.

i made a command scriptlet (basically just a one liner) so you could emerge everything from a copy of a world file (something i had to devise to restore a system with a broken backup). if i find it later i'll post it here.

~amd64, worth the risk?

~amd64, worth the risk?

Re: ~amd64, worth the risk?