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szatox
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Joined: 27 Aug 2013
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 Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2024 10:31 am Post subject: |
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| wjb wrote: | | They're reasonable PCs, they should not be throttling just because they're being worked a bit. Have they been dusted out recently? |
Not so sure about that. Dust is certainly bad, but my mobility line TP never had a reasonable cooling. Apparently this line only has a single heatpipe where the standard line units come with 2. It is still a pretty high spec laptop now, a few years later, but it never gives it's all for more than a few seconds. Numbers advertised on the box just don't mean a thing anymore.*
This said, speed stepping does sometimes act in bizarre ways when I'm watching videos, so maybe there are some funny interractions with GPU on top of cooling being bad by design. Well, I'll figure it out one day... Probably.
*also, my new pet peeves: water resistant devices, which explicitly don't cover water damage under warranty. Seriously, resistance up 10m is totally enough for swimming, 30m for free diving, and 50m for a shallow water exploration, not "keep it in a desert", "barely survives splashing" and "you can shower with it".
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lars_the_bear
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Joined: 05 Jun 2024
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| Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2024 11:03 am Post subject: |
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| szatox wrote: | | wjb wrote: | | They're reasonable PCs, they should not be throttling just because they're being worked a bit. Have they been dusted out recently? |
Not so sure about that. Dust is certainly bad, but my mobility line TP never had a reasonable cooling. Apparently this line only has a single heatpipe where the standard line units come with 2. It is still a pretty high spec laptop now, a few years later, but it never gives it's all for more than a few seconds. Numbers advertised on the box just don't mean a thing anymore.*
This said, speed stepping does sometimes act in bizarre ways when I'm watching videos, so maybe there are some funny interractions with GPU on top of cooling being bad by design. Well, I'll figure it out one day... Probably.
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I think the cooling is fine -- they're H-class CPUs that are designed to run hot. I throttle them more myself, to prevent a fire risk. The air that comes out of the exhaust is hot enough to cook with, and it's certainly hot enough to melt the varnish on my desk. If heat wasn't being conducted properly, I don't think the exhaust would be so hot. The manual says "don't put this on your lap", despite the name "laptop". It also says that you shouldn't rest your fingers on the keyboard, because you might get burned. I've been in contact with Lenovo about this in the past, and they tell me that it's "normal". But I wouldn't leave a machine unattended whilst it's doing this kind of thing, because I don't want to burn my house down. Also, although Lenovo thinks that the CPU can run at 90C "indefinitely", I'm not sure they really mean the same by 'indefinitely' as I do.
But I think we've discussed this in other threads. It's not the age or slowness of these laptops that makes compiling such a problem, it's the heat management.
BR, Lars. |
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asturm
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Joined: 05 Apr 2007
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| Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2024 11:06 am Post subject: |
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| In another thread you reported the qtwebengine build time memory estimate at 80gb. So this problem will be very much self inflicted. |
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lars_the_bear
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Joined: 05 Jun 2024
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| Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2024 11:16 am Post subject: |
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| asturm wrote: | | In another thread you reported the qtwebengine build time memory estimate at 80gb. So this problem will be very much self inflicted. |
Maybe so. The choice to build it once was self-inflicted, I agree. I was rather hoping never to build it again. That's the problem -- I was prepared for a huge up-front compilation burden. What I wasn't prepared for was the ongoing invitations to recompile things that work perfectly well as they are.
I'm not blaming anybody for this -- it just took me completely by surprise.
BR, Lars. |
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asturm
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| Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2024 2:50 pm Post subject: |
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| No, that is just your configuration mistake in make.conf, that's why I said self inflicted. But this has now been settled in your other thread anyway. |
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pjp
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| Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2024 10:51 pm Post subject: |
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@lars_the_bear,
Have you fixed EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS yet? I'm curious what qtwebengine says it needs after making that change.
As for laptop cooling, look in messages for something along the lines of "Core temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled".
I don't know when that becomes a problem, but it is why I only very briefly compiled updates on my laptop.
I _think_ you understand now how you can "install once" and then never updated again after that until the annual reinstall? I'm curious if that's still as necessary with the removal of jobs and load set to 40.
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lars_the_bear
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Joined: 05 Jun 2024
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| Posted: Thu Sep 19, 2024 7:25 am Post subject: |
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| pjp wrote: |
Have you fixed EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS yet? I'm curious what qtwebengine says it needs after making that change.
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Thanks. It turns out that the relevant figure here isn't --jobs, but MAKEOPTS. Maybe that's obvious to everybody else, I don't know. The amount of memory emerge seems to want for qtwebengine is 2Gb * make_jobs, that is 2Gb times the value set in '-j'. I hadn't set that parameter at all, but on my system it seems to default to 40, for some reason. I'm pretty sure I don't have 40 CPU cores.
Anyhow, I've tweaked -j so that the memory figure is more reasonable for my system. I still don't want to build qtwebengine, though, unless I have to. The system is currently working fine.
| Quote: |
I _think_ you understand now how you can "install once" and then never updated again after that until the annual reinstall? I'm curious if that's still as necessary with the removal of jobs and load set to 40. |
It seems to me that I can:
1. Set up one machine and populate the binhost. Then set up others within a short-ish timeframe, using the binhost as the package source. I'm not sure how long 'short-ish' is, but clearly two months is too long.
2. Set up one machine, and rsync the whole root filesystem to the others, after a minimal install. I suppose that, rather than rsync, I could just make a tarball of the whole root filesystem and put it on a USB stick. It's about 200Gb with all the applications I use.
I think for my retirement I want one laptop and one desktop computer, and nothing else. All the installations I'm doing at the moment are to try to work out which of my huge pile of obsolete equipment are most likely to be useful in those roles.
Sigh. The amount of time I've wasted on this -- if I'd put that time into my freelance work, I could have bought a computer store. It's just that I have a pathological dread of discarding stuff that still works. And I have a weird, sentimental attachment to my old laptops :/
BR, Lars. |
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asturm
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| Posted: Thu Sep 19, 2024 7:45 am Post subject: |
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| lars_the_bear wrote: | | I hadn't set that parameter at all, but on my system it seems to default to 40, for some reason. I'm pretty sure I don't have 40 CPU cores. |
As I already said, these values are fundamentally your responsibility. There is no way around it.
And you definitely want to lower your EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS --jobs value too, to, maybe, 2 at most.
Quoting myself from the other thread:
| asturm wrote: | That is obviously the moment where you look into the Gentoo Handbook section regarding make.conf settings. It should look familiar to you, but if not, I guess a few people would be interested by what other means you have been installing Gentoo so far.
I mean, even the statement about having it installed more than 30 times during a couple of months raises a big red flag to me. You would be an expert in Gentoo configuration by now. |
Last edited by asturm on Thu Sep 19, 2024 7:47 am; edited 2 times in total |
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freke
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Joined: 23 Jan 2003
Posts: 1028
Location: Somewhere in Denmark
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| Posted: Thu Sep 19, 2024 7:45 am Post subject: |
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| lars_the_bear wrote: |
It seems to me that I can:
1. Set up one machine and populate the binhost. Then set up others within a short-ish timeframe, using the binhost as the package source. I'm not sure how long 'short-ish' is, but clearly two months is too long.
2. Set up one machine, and rsync the whole root filesystem to the others, after a minimal install. I suppose that, rather than rsync, I could just make a tarball of the whole root filesystem and put it on a USB stick. It's about 200Gb with all the applications I use.
I think for my retirement I want one laptop and one desktop computer, and nothing else. All the installations I'm doing at the moment are to try to work out which of my huge pile of obsolete equipment are most likely to be useful in those roles.
Sigh. The amount of time I've wasted on this -- if I'd put that time into my freelance work, I could have bought a computer store. It's just that I have a pathological dread of discarding stuff that still works. And I have a weird, sentimental attachment to my old laptops :/
BR, Lars. |
Setup you binhost as a local mirror - and have your other installations sync the repository from that; then they'll be in the same state.
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Local_Mirror |
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lars_the_bear
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Joined: 05 Jun 2024
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| Posted: Thu Sep 19, 2024 7:50 am Post subject: |
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| freke wrote: |
Setup you binhost as a local mirror - and have your other installations sync the repository from that; then they'll be in the same state.
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Thank you. I suppose that's more elegant than just rsync'ing the root filesystems from one machine to another; but does it offer any technical advantages?
Actually, perhaps it would be of benefit I didn't need the machines to be identically confgured?
BR, Lars. |
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pjp
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Joined: 16 Apr 2002
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| Posted: Thu Sep 19, 2024 6:19 pm Post subject: |
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| lars_the_bear wrote: | | Thanks. It turns out that the relevant figure here isn't --jobs, but MAKEOPTS. Maybe that's obvious to everybody else, I don't know. |
I doubt obvious, but probably learned from experience. I believe the install guide provides an effective description. The variable is MAKEOPTS, yes, but the setting within MAKEOPTS is -j or --jobs (and I think load-average too).
If you do 'man emerge' you will see a reference to -j [JOBS], --jobs[=JOBS]. If you were to search the same man page for MAKEOPTS, the only result references 'man 5 make.conf'. From that is an explanation of MAKEOPTS, inlcuding -j, --jobs. It also references the make utility. And from 'man make' you can see the similarity of description for make's -j, --jobs option. That's not an easy trail to find if you aren't somewhat familiar with it, which is why I mentioned the description in the install guide.
| lars_the_bear wrote: | | Anyhow, I've tweaked -j so that the memory figure is more reasonable for my system. I still don't want to build qtwebengine, though, unless I have to. The system is currently working fine. |
I wouldn't wish building qtwebengine on anyone :). I'm mainly curious if you notice any general improvements since it seemed your experience was below what many thought you should have. It may or may not have a significant impact on how you perceive updates.
| lars_the_bear wrote: | It seems to me that I can:
1. Set up one machine and populate the binhost. Then set up others within a short-ish timeframe, using the binhost as the package source. I'm not sure how long 'short-ish' is, but clearly two months is too long.
2. Set up one machine, and rsync the whole root filesystem to the others, after a minimal install. I suppose that, rather than rsync, I could just make a tarball of the whole root filesystem and put it on a USB stick. It's about 200Gb with all the applications I use. |
There is a better way than relying on "short-ish time frame". - use the binhost as the only computer that syncs the ::gentoo repository from Gentoo mirrors.
- other computers sync ::gentoo from the binhost as well as retrieve binary packages from the binhost.
That keeps everything in sync and you needn't worry about profile changes.
If you save a copy of the ::gentoo repository (I use squashfs images), you can sync the binhost and see what changes are available. You can go back to the previously saved squashfs image without having made any changes. Then when you want, you can do some updates on the binhost in a controlled manner. And only when ready, you can have the other computers sync ::gentoo to whatever is your current chosen image and perform updates.
| lars_the_bear wrote: | | I think for my retirement I want one laptop and one desktop computer, and nothing else. All the installations I'm doing at the moment are to try to work out which of my huge pile of obsolete equipment are most likely to be useful in those roles. |
I'm doing something similar, although my main purpose is to have some systems I can use for testing. I'd like to set up something to host ::gentoo snapshots with much easier selection of which one I want to use. That would be great for a file system that supported deduplication. I'd also like to simplify installation and recovery.
| lars_the_bear wrote: | Sigh. The amount of time I've wasted on this -- if I'd put that time into my freelance work, I could have bought a computer store. It's just that I have a pathological dread of discarding stuff that still works. And I have a weird, sentimental attachment to my old laptops :/
BR, Lars. |
I think most people aren't starting with your constraints and learn various aspects of using Gentoo over time. It seems like you're trying to cram for an exam on a topic that you've never had exposure too and are realizing the expectation of results was unreasonable. It seems that you've managed to get a lot done, but without a solid understanding of what it is you've actually done.
For example, not syncing multiple computers from one of your own instead of syncing each of them with official mirrors. That's a very common question from new-ish users who decide to install on multiple computers. If not careful, mirrors will temporarily block an IP address for syncing too frequently. I don't think there is an official limit that is public, but it is very gracious. Sometimes users hit that limit, which is one way they learn about syncing from their own mirror.
Also, you mentioned having done 30-ish installs, but don't seem very familiar with some basic installation procedures. That's somewhat surprising given how close together you've performed those installs. In my 20+ years of using Gentoo, I don't know if I've done more than 10. I can count 3-4 physical installs and maybe a similar amount of VM installs. That's 6-8, and if we assume I forgot about a physical install and some virtual ones, I'm still not much over 10.
I think you would benefit from "slowing down" and putting more effort into absorbing what you're doing. And I like the idea of one laptop and one PC, especially if the PC is used in part as a binhost! But that's just my perspective from reading your posts. and it may differ greatly from reality.
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lars_the_bear
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Joined: 05 Jun 2024
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| Posted: Thu Sep 19, 2024 7:26 pm Post subject: |
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| pjp wrote: | It seems like you're trying to cram for an exam on a topic that you've never had exposure too and are realizing the expectation of results was unreasonable. It seems that you've managed to get a lot done, but without a solid understanding of what it is you've actually done.
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You put that very nicely. The cramming is because I want to get everything sorted out before I retire, and the "serious" computers go back to my employer and clients, and I'm left with my old war-horses.
But thank you for the advice, which I will endeavour to implement.
BR, Lars. |
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