Helium Sources (kernel patchset)

hirakendu · Guru Joined: 24 Jan 2007 Posts: 386 Location: san diego

First things first - Ok, I now get it. Helium1 doesnt have phc, only thinkpad extras. Helium2 does have it. I have a feeling you are using helium(1).

Now the fun part - what on earth - you can turn off the fan

. Lol, then I must give it a try too. Although I am too afraid of burning out my cpu on my notebook ;-)

. (Especially given the fact that not so long ago, I had burnt up my good old athlon-xp 2000+. It used to run at 73 degrees celsius while playing doom3 ;-)

.)
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Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd

Phlogiston · Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 10:39 am Post subject:

hirakendu · Guru Joined: 24 Jan 2007 Posts: 386 Location: san diego

There is absolutely no difference

. Except for the 4k-stacks thing. In fact if you don't use ndiswrapper or reiser4 or such (which apparently need 8k stacks, infact ndiswrapper wants 16k

), you can (should/must/may/will) use kamikaze-sources itself.

(A couple of minor things. I mount iso images frequently and apparently 2.6.22 doesnt create /dev/loop* entries by default and udev is supposed to do it. So there was this patch in mm-tree to re-enable that. And the other thing is a patch (from myriad forum searches long time back :p : http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=489805) for the conexant audio codec on my notebook on which alsa still needs to improvise on.)

Anyway, the kernel has been working fine for me. So, what better way to share the pleasure

. (Although seems that it hasnt really been a 'pleasurable' experience for you ;-)

. )
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Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd

Phlogiston · Posted: Tue Jun 12, 2007 7:02 am Post subject:

Hmm now I have that problem again:

hirakendu · Guru Joined: 24 Jan 2007 Posts: 386 Location: san diego

Btw, what does that module do ? I modprobe it and it just quietly loads. Can't even see it in lsmod or dmesg. Incidentally, I have been running this kernel for over 3-4 days without rebooting on both my workstation and notebook. Seems to be rock stable :-)

.
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Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd

Phlogiston · Posted: Tue Jun 12, 2007 7:44 am Post subject:

hirakendu · Guru Joined: 24 Jan 2007 Posts: 386 Location: san diego

Frankly, I myself forgot ;-)

. Helium1 was pretty simple - just the usual genpatches, suspend2, unionfs, reiser4, powertop, thinkpad, udf, and ipw3945. There was no phc, ck-patchset, cfs-sched. Those were the only main things I can remember missing.
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Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd

Phlogiston · Posted: Tue Jun 12, 2007 8:30 am Post subject:

Phlogiston · Posted: Sat Jun 16, 2007 8:20 am Post subject:

martin.k · Posted: Sun Jun 17, 2007 8:10 pm Post subject:

-ck patchset is dead !!!
http://members.optusnet.com.au/ckolivas/kernel/
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hirakendu · Guru Joined: 24 Jan 2007 Posts: 386 Location: san diego

First, my condolences for ck-patchset

. Was an essential ingredient of any performance patch till now

. Then again, the recent kernels (2.6.18+) have been reasonably fast and interactive. Although stability has taken a hit - so that seems to be the major concern (for me :p) though. The good thing is, for now, 2.6.22 (rc's) seem to be really really stable

.

A small change made to the helium patches (no version revision :p). This was regarding vmware-modules unable to compile. Made the changes to include/asm-i386/page.h (syntax stuff) to get vmware compiled. (From the thread : http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=677688 )
Also, one has to edit the vmware-modules ebuild to use vmware-any-any-update110 (instead of 109). (Details : Edit /usr/portage/eclass/vmware.eclass and look for the variable ANY_ANY="vmware-any-any-update109" and change it to 110. And do ebuild digest for appropriate ebuilds in app-emulation/vmware-modules and vmware-workstation etc.)

And a small note on ipw3945. Although the ipw3945 v1.2.1 included in the patch is pretty fine, had some troubles connecting with knetworkmanager. Also had issues with iwl3945 and knetworkmanager - seems to reset and take time to reconnect frequently (thats a networkmanager policy to look for better connections frequently ?). (Besides, iwl3945, rather the d80211 system doesn't have the LED functionality as of now?) For now, ipw3945 1.2.0 in the portage seems to work perfectly. If using this, then disable the ipw3945 in kernel. Also might require to edit the ebuild to continue compiling with the in kernel 80211 system without cribbing ;-)

.
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Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd

hirakendu · Guru Joined: 24 Jan 2007 Posts: 386 Location: san diego

2.6.22-helium3 = 2.6.22-kamikaze1 - 4k_stacks - hrtimers - acpi_dsdt_initrd :
http://hirakendu.mooo.com/helium-sources/2.6.22-helium3/2.6.22-helium3.patch.bz2
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Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd

hirakendu · Guru Joined: 24 Jan 2007 Posts: 386 Location: san diego

Here is another new one : 2.6.24-helium0. It is based on 2.6.24-rc8-git4 and tries to be as close to vanilla as possible with the following features :

kernelOfTruth · Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2008 10:34 am Post subject:

thanks, hirakendu !

I'll give them a test-ride

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hirakendu · Guru Joined: 24 Jan 2007 Posts: 386 Location: san diego

thanks. hopefully you have a vanilla experience

.
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Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd

makism · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 24 Oct 2007 Posts: 85

just booted the .24-hellium1, i`ll stick with it for some time to check it :p

kernelOfTruth · Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2008 2:00 pm Post subject:

luqas · Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2008 2:49 pm Post subject:

Going to give these a spin. Love the minimalist approach of this kernel, plus I want to try out tuxonice.

Just curious as to what the git-alsa patch adds?

hirakendu · Guru Joined: 24 Jan 2007 Posts: 386 Location: san diego

Thanks for using it and appreciating the minimalist approach. (Just banking on the idea that vanilla should be enterprise class, so modify it as less as I can

.)

The git-alsa patch is not really really necessary. Just for explicit support of newer C-Media Oxygen based audio cards (which might be already there in vanilla). (There is always some new audio hardware that needs git-alsa.) Moreover, it looks it doesn't break anything (I hate regressions

). Plus I am not sure if alsa in vanilla already has the strict power saving features.

About the fastness part. Here is my config. On both my notebook (dell vostro 1400) and workstation (athlon64x2 3800+ & nv geforce 7300gs), I run a 100Hz dyn ticks kernel with no pre-empt whatsoever and no fiddling with any features. (Also using 4k stacks and slub, which are bog standard by now

.) Essentially what might be called a very 'server' type kernel. And I am reasonably happy with that. It is very stable. Merrily runs doom3 even after days of uptime. And interactive enough for my purposes. Also good for battery I suppose. There may be something 'faster', but I am very happy with this. I think after years of kernel compiling, every one settles on his/her own magic config

. Now then again, I haven't ever tried it on lesser hardware, both my machines are dual core

.

As a side remark, I have removed latencytop. It requires frame-pointers among other debug stuff to be enabled. I am ok with that, though my CLAGS have -fomit-frame-pointer. But the surprising thing is that even after doing that, when I ran the latencytop application, the list was blank

. If anyone has tried latencytop before, does this need CONFIG_EMBEDDED=y ? (general setup, configure standard kernel features for small systems).

@ KernelOfTruth : The patches in .24-h1 are same as in h0, adding the reiser4-fix-null-pointer-dereference-in-sys_truncate64.patch as you suggested in zen-sources thread. Thanks for that.
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Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd

praka123 · Posted: Fri Mar 28, 2008 1:31 am Post subject:

@hirakendo:
any updates :0
what about 2.6.24?
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hirakendu · Guru Joined: 24 Jan 2007 Posts: 386 Location: san diego

Its up-to-date always

. 2.6.24-helium1 is the latest. (Although updated pretty frequently, name is not

.) As mentioned before, includes latest resier4 (from mm, with extras), aufs and unionfs, squashfs 3.3 with lzma, tuxonice (suspend2), fbcondecor (fbsplash), and also atl2 driver (from sabayon) for attansic l2 ethernet in eeepc. It includes 2.6.24.4. So apply the patch to vanilla 2.6.24. Also, as a sidenote, I use only even numbered kernels, no next will be 2.6.26.
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Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd

hirakendu · Guru Joined: 24 Jan 2007 Posts: 386 Location: san diego

Here is a newer version of helium sources patch for 2.6.25 (2.6.25-helium1) :

hirakendu · Guru Joined: 24 Jan 2007 Posts: 386 Location: san diego

There we are : 2.6.26

. And here's another helium-sources 2.6.26-helium0 (patch and precompiled sources) :

hirakendu · Guru Joined: 24 Jan 2007 Posts: 386 Location: san diego

2.6.26-helium1 :