May 2022 - Talk - lists.gtalug.org

war story: power failure makes CentOS system unbootable
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 30 Sep '22

30 Sep '22

tl;dr / spoiler: change fstab so that /boot/efi is not automatically mounted. See the recommendation at the end of this message. My gateway computer is a little PC running CentOS. It does not come back after a power failure. The reason (as best I can tell) is interesting and I think that I have a fix. My system is UEFI. It boots from a UEFI system partition, known as /boot/efi to Linux. If this gets corrupted, it won't boot. It is a VFAT partition. On my gateway (a Zotac Zbox RI321, a cute little box with two ethernet ports), the UEFI firmware apparently won't boot if the dirty bit is set in the system partition. CentOS normally runs with /boot/efi mounted. So when the system isn't shut down cleanly, the dirty bit will be on. Consequence: the system is not going to boot after a power failure. Odd observation 1: if I put a live Fedora 25 USB stick in the system and try to boot in this otherwise-unbootable state, CentOS boots from the main disk. So this really looks like a firmware bug/quirk. Odd observation 2: fsck doesn't seem to automatically fix the system partition. Once CentOS 7 booted, I dismounted /boot/efi and did an fsck on it. $ sudo fsck /dev/sda1 fsck from util-linux 2.23.2 fsck.fat 3.0.20 (12 Jun 2013) 0x25: Dirty bit is set. Fs was not properly unmounted and some data may be corrupt. 1) Remove dirty bit 2) No action ? 1 Leaving filesystem unchanged. /dev/sda1: 16 files, 2420/51145 clusters Googling got me to <https://www.centos.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=50917> In particular, this advice seemed quite good: ==== recommendation ==== Two other changes I recommend for UEFI systems, to each OS's /etc/fstab. - For the /boot/efi mountpoint, add the mount options x-systemd.automount,noauto - Change fs_passno (last column) to a 1 or 2; the canonical fstab instructions suggest 2, but systemd treats 1 and 2 as the same. The first change means the EFI System partition will not be automatically read-write mounted at boot time; it's a bad idea this is the default because it puts the ESP at risk especially if ther are crashes, FAT has no journal and will therefore always be marked dirty in such a case; no other UEFI OS mounts the ESP by default. Second, if anything tries to access /boot/efi (read or write), systemd will automatically mount it, and because of the fs_passno 1 or 2, it will fsck it first and that fixes and clears the dirty bit in case it's set. Right now without these changes, it's just a matter of having the right number and bad timing of crashes to render the EFI System partition corrupt.

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[GTALUG-Announce] May Meeting
by Alan Heighway 23 Jun '22

23 Jun '22

Linux on RISC-V <https://gtalug.org/meeting/2022-05/> with Drew Fustini <https://gtalug.org/> 10 May, 2022 at 07:30 PM It is an exciting time for Linux on RISC-V, the open instruction set (ISA) that is quickly gaining critical mass. I will introduce the pieces needed to boot Linux on RISC-V including the Privileged Architecture, OpenSBI and U-Boot, and how that fits into the upcoming RISC-V Platform Specification. I will break down support for existing hardware and current upstreaming efforts. We're going to use Big Blue Button for this meeting: *Join Big Blue Button:* https://blue.lpi.org/b/eva-zjc-gjy-kgl *A*lan *H*eighway <http://heighway.ca/> heighway.ca VA3WAH / VA3YKZ [image: Please consider the environment before printing] --- GTALUG Announce mailing list announce(a)gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/announce

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From Slackware to which distro?
by William Park 15 Jun '22

15 Jun '22

Hi All, I've been running Slackware since forever. It's time to grow up and see the world. Which distro would you recommend that I move to? Yes, I know it's personal, and reasons will be varied and educational. - Ubuntu -- OK. I use it at work in VM and in WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). For me, Mint is another flavour, just like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc. - Oracle -- I use it at work too. Was CentOS, but switched to Oracle because they said delivering end-of-life OS is bad marketing. - Fedora -- OK. Doesn't seem to have its equivalent in Ubuntu side. - OpenSUSE -- Difficult to pin down. It uses RPM but in their own way. It has rolling release (Tumbleweed) and versioned release (Leap). - Arch -- no. I don't need/want to learn what they are trying to teach. I run Slackware, so I already know all that. Thanks for any feedback. William

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LLVM JIT Talks
by Nicholas Krause 26 May '22

26 May '22

Greetings I've misdeleted the other thread, so sorry for starting a new one. For David, I would be happy to try if you let me know what the interest/use case is. On a side note, for Alan I've asked him to contact you directly. Hopefully he contacts you soon. If he does not in the next few weeks, I will ping him for you. Nick

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Possible Future Talks
by Nicholas Krause 24 May '22

24 May '22

Greetings, I've managed to get in contact with the maintainer for the LLVM RiscV backend. Not sure if it's of interest to the group. But, he can talk about compiler backends in general or related to RiscV. For those who aren't aware as discussed at the RiscV talk, this would be the compiler support for the ISA for RiscV. Or if there is another topic from the LLVM side I can try to find someone there. Take care, Nick

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Ventoy: use single USB stick for multiple installation images
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 17 May '22

17 May '22

"Ventoy" is an open-source tool that allows you to put multiple .iso files on a USB stick. Has anyone tried it? <https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventoy> Why do I care? When I want to install Fedora, for example, I fetch a .iso file and dd it straight to a USB stick. The result is a bootable live Fedora system that can install Fedora to a disk drive. This same procedure works for Ubuntu and a lot of other distros. One downside is that I have a collection of USB sticks that each has a .iso file. Each USB stick is mostly empty because .iso files are smaller than current USB sticks. Ventoy might allow me to use a single USB stick for my whole collection.

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Sharing EFI partition for multiple distro?
by William Park 17 May '22

17 May '22

Can you use the same EFI partition for multiple distros? Eg. Can you have /dev/sda1 -- /boot/efi /dev/sda2 -- Slackware / /dev/sda3 -- Ubuntu / /dev/sda4 -- Fedora / where /dev/sda1 shared? Or, does distro need its own EFI partitions, like /dev/sda1 -- Slackware /boot/efi /dev/sda2 -- Slackware / /dev/sda3 -- Ubuntu /boot/efi /dev/sda4 -- Ubuntu / /dev/sda5 -- Fedora /boot/efi /dev/sda6 -- Fedora / ?

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Back to basics: upgrading from Windows to Linux
by Evan Leibovitch 12 May '22

12 May '22

Hi all. This topic is one I hope will be on many peoples' minds as they encounter frustration (and in some cases a dead end) moving their Windows 10 systems to Windows 11. This may soon become the source of a multi-stakeholder public campaign, but that's just in the planning stages. Now for the personal angle. Some ago I installed Windows on a desktop I use a lot. It replaced Linux because that was incapable of running the one game I like playing. I even gave a talk to GTALUG about that move, about Windows Subsystem for Linux and the things I thought were better about the Windows desktop. Turns out I was wrong. So very, very wrong. And now I can't wait to go back to my Linux desktop, especially since there's a recent LTS release of Kubuntu, my traditional distro of choice. Plus, according to ProtonDB, my game might just run well natively on Linux <https://www.protondb.com/app/255710>! But it's been a long time since I've done this so I have some remedial questions to ask from this group's wisdom ... to help me change from a Windows install to a dual boot, priority Kubuntu: 1. My motherboard takes a single M.2 SSD for my one and only drive. I have a larger M.2 card that I'd like to replace it with, cloning my existing setup to the new drive (in a temporary USB enclosure) then installing and shrinking the Windows partition in anticipation of the Linux dual-boot install. Can anyone recommend a good tool for doing the disk clone? Or am I better off to just fresh-install Windows on the new drive, and restore my data from the old one? 2. I want to have one partition for data that is visible regardless if I boot Linux or Windows. Previously the most reliable filesystem readable by bothwas FAT32. Should I still do that? Is Linux support for NTFS good enough now? Even better, can Windows be taught to read ext4? 3. I've never used snap or flatpack before. Others have told me to install as much native (ie, .deb packages) as possible, use flatpack when it's the only option and uninstall snap. Any comments or caveats here? And why did app installation sources become needlessly complex? Thanks for any advice. - Evan

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RISC-V talk tonight
by Trevor Woerner 10 May '22

10 May '22

Was tonight's talk announced on this list? My friend Drew Fustini, who is a "RISC-V Ambassador" for RISC-V International, will be giving a talk on Linux and RISC-V at tonight's GTALUG meeting at 7:30 https://gtalug.org/meeting/2022-05/

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RISC-V
by Ivan Avery Frey 10 May '22

10 May '22

"RISC-V chip designed with open source tools - eeNews Europe" https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/risc-v-chip-designed-with-open-source-tools/

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