Do we need a PhD in portage in order to use Gentoo?

orionbelt · Apprentice Joined: 05 Apr 2006 Posts: 178

I am bringing up this question here after having asked it in a bug report and in a forum topic and having received no answer.

In short, i am stuck with kernel 4.4.39, i.e. 4 stable versions too old, because "it's the maintainer's policy not to apply patches to address kernel compatibility issues [for nvidia-drivers] as this is often a moving target". This is despite the fact that a successful patch has been applied, and apparently still works for all 4.9 kernels, so it is not so much of a moving target, after all. Furthermore (please correct me if i am wrong), it is the kernel that has changed interfaces, not the nvidia drivers, and for all of Nvidia's atrocities towards Linux, i am not sure whether we should expect them to follow up with an immediate new release after every Linux kernel change...

So, my first question is whether it is official Gentoo policy to have the users apply patches instead of applying the patch once and for all centrally, at the repository level.

After giving up on waiting, i decided to dive into applying the patch myself, a task that i didn't have to do so far. So i used the link provided in Comment 10 of the aforementioned bug report:

khayyam

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

The Doctor · Moderator Joined: 27 Jul 2010 Posts: 2678

Hu · Administrator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 22657

As I understand it, the problem with the nVidia drivers is that they put themselves in a bad spot. On the one hand, they refuse to upstream their driver, so they are stuck maintaining their own compatibility layer, trying to interface to an upstream target that has been very clear about not keeping a guaranteed API over time. On the other hand, they wrote their driver to depend so deeply on kernel internals that regular development churn in the mainline kernel routinely breaks the compatibility shim. If they did not depend on kernel functions that keep changing for good reason, or if they would delegate the compatibility updates to the community, they would be fine. They chose the middle path, which is far more painful than either of those. That pain mostly falls on them, but spills out onto users unfortunate enough to need the nVidia driver (instead of the open one, which unfortunately is not perfectly competitive). If you aren't one of those users who needs the closed nVidia driver, you could switch to Nouveau to avoid this mess.

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 9280

krinn · Watchman Joined: 02 May 2003 Posts: 7470

If you look at kernel.org you'll get 12 kernels, out of those 12, 4 only are 4.9+
So 8 kernels remains compatible with nvidia drivers, and in real only two that are LTS 4.9.24 and stable 4.10.12 are problematic, other 2 are mainline and next, both unstable.
So even nvidia is doing "bad" generally because of the binary drivers, in this case, even if they would release a new version that still doesn't work with 3.9, it would still be a version that would works with the majority of kernels release so far.

So for me and for that specific case only, i'll blame
gentoo devs (seriously refusing a patch that works for no reason, that argument about moving fast is so stupid when you see gentoo kernel using patches to fix radeon issue on 3.9.9, look at the size of this one)

It's a pity to see some gentoo devs use their position to promote their own mentality or feelings against a company, to a point it hurt gentoo (they are gentoo devs, and should work for gentoo community and not use gentoo for their own war nobody cares about).

gentoo devs not using the patch are doing shit.
gentoo devs stabilizing both nvidia drivers and kernel that are not compatible with each other are doing shit.
gentoo devs using patchse that were last update 2 years ago! (the last one is for 3.9.9 series) are doing shit
gentoo devs telling anyone blahblahblah nvidia instead of speaking about lack of maintenance on the patchset are doing shit.

Yeah we could blame nvidia all we want for the binary drivers, but it wouldn't remove the fact gentoo devs are doing shit there.

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 9280

tld · Veteran Joined: 09 Dec 2003 Posts: 1845

As I just posted to that other thread, I'm using x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-304.134 on my x86 system with an older nVidia card with sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-4.9.6-r1 and the patch posted in that thread.

And yes...I put all these issues on nVidia for sure, and would never expect their crap to get in the way of kernel stabilization etc. It's been an ongoing battle for me for sure, but one that I put 100% on nVidia and not Gentoo or the kernel.

Tom

krinn · Watchman Joined: 02 May 2003 Posts: 7470

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 9280

Roman_Gruber

Roman_Gruber

Tony0945 · Posted: Mon Apr 24, 2017 8:45 pm Post subject:

If you are not gaming or using multiple cards or screens, please try using the kernel's nouveau driver. It will do the basic display.

To Roman-Gruber, surely you are not gaming on a notebook?

Latest 4.4 kernel is 4.4.63, just unmask it if necessary. Upstream kernels are coming fast and furious (too fast IMHO). I just built 4.10.11 yesterday and now 4.10.12 is out. I don't know how Linus can consider releasing a kernel every week is stable.

orionbelt · Apprentice Joined: 05 Apr 2006 Posts: 178

First, thanks to Hu for his explanation of the nature of the problem with nVidia drivers. I guess i should retract the statement that "it is the kernel that has changed interfaces, not the nvidia drivers, and for all of Nvidia's atrocities towards Linux, i am not sure whether we should expect them to follow up with an immediate new release after every Linux kernel change", since the root problem is nVidia's decision to depend on kernel functions that keep changing while refusing to upstream their driver. I will also grant asturm that the 4.4 kernel series has advanced quite a bit in terms of versions (i don't know in terms of time but still...), so nVidia should have provided an update by now. Well, Gentoo devs didn't know that when they refused to patch early on, but let us assume that they "knew" this would be nVidia's tactic...

However, it is clear that this was not my main point. Of course, i would not expect Gentoo devs to spend their time coming up with a fix or harvesting nVidia forums (though i am curious about what happened with other, bigger distros and whether Gentoo could have copied their solution). My main point was that there was a kind soul who provided a patch, and several people confirmed it was working for them. So all Gentoo devs had to do was apply that patch to benefit us all. The only reason presented in the bug report as to why this doesn't happen is that "it's the maintainer's policy not to apply patches to address kernel compatibility issues as this is often a moving target". To which i counter that there are already 7 versions of the 4.9 kernel branch on Gentoo, and 5 of the 4.10 branch for which the patch or a very similar one may also work. So it's clear that the target does not move that fast, and it's more than just a kernel subversion or two that would benefit from the patch. Besides, it's not that patching is a rare activity. Kernels have already plenty of patches, and so do many other packages.

Let me put it slightly differently: If this did not concern nvidia-drivers but some other package, would Gentoo devs be equally reluctant to apply patches?

So, unless there is some other valid counter-argument that i am missing, it seems to me that as irrational as it may seem (as asturm explained), the anti-nVidia sentiment of some developers (which may be well justified) has become anti-nVidia-user sentiment (which, i think, is much less justified). Or at least they may feel justified in their inaction since it's the users' "fault" for choosing nVidia. As if their users always have a choice as to the hardware they run on. Or as if their users should have known that a choice made 8 or 9 years ago, when the nvidia drivers worked fine, would necessarily lead to today's situation. Again, i am not asking for Gentoo devs to work more because some of their users have nVidia GPUs, but when a patch comes up and it's so easy to apply, i find their refusal to do so quite staggering.

May i add that, open source drivers or not, it's not that AMD's GPUs are piece of cake for Linux. I just tried to use one on a modern laptop a few weeks ago, and there was apparently no way! I ended up using the Intel CPU's integrated GPU, and i read that even Intel is not as good as it used to be with Linux support of its integrated GPUs. So yes, the issues may not be those faced with nVidia's attitudes, but using AMD or Intel GPUs isn't a panacea either. Or perhaps we should return to console mode?

krinn recommended to stay with my current series-4.4 kernel, which i am doing anyway by necessity

Well, presumably new kernels can contain security fixes, so i try to keep up with the stable kernels in gentoo-sources. My attitude is that this is what a distribution is there for, and people who know better than i decide about kernel progression, and i can save my time by following their stable versions. Besides, i don't know which 4.4 subversions are LTS, in which case i could worry less about security fixes...

Hu and Tony0945 suggested switching to nouveau. Well, i may have to if the current situation persists and neither nVidia nor our beloved Gentoo devs are shamed into action...

When i tried nouveau some 8 years ago, it had quite a few issues but it has surely improved since then, and i now see that at least on paper it looks quite nice for my GPU.

Still, my motivation for this thread was developer attitude towards (not) applying an existing patch because it concerns nvidia-drivers. I wanted to see how universal this attitude is and, unfortunately IMO, it seems to be quite universal...

orionbelt · Apprentice Joined: 05 Apr 2006 Posts: 178

A couple of weeks after the discussion above, i was able to apply an appropriate patch so that i can use kernel 4.9 with nvidia-drivers 340.101 and 340.102. In retrospect, it is something that can be done in 5 minutes if you know exactly what to do. But it took me several hours, spread over several days, to figure it out.

At first i thought of posting here a write-up of my "adventures", for two reasons. One, to show even more clearly to the developers in this discussion, who may be used to patching, that it's not as easy for a first-timer as they seem to think (in addition to my argument that Gentoo should not expect from simple users to be fluent in the ebuild system in order to use Gentoo). Second, to offer it as documentation to those who may have the same problems as i had.

In the end, i decided that my time, of which i had already wasted enough to find a fix on my own, would not be worth it: Judging from previous responses, i doubt that any kind of rational argument could convince some people to change their mind about this. They are convinced that simple users should be able to use ebuild... As for offering back to the community, well, the notion of a "community" assumes certain collaborative and social qualities beyond the "i'll do as i please" attitude, and such qualities are manifestly absent here... (Still, if anyone wishes to know, i'll be happy to provide details).

Recently nvidia-drivers 340.102-r1 came out, and once again, i proved to myself how hopelessly naive i am. I thought that the patch might have been applied this time (assuming nVidia didn't fix it by themselves), so i disabled my user patch before emerging the new nvidia-drivers, and restarted X. "Of course", X crashed. In fact, it was worse than with 340.101: Now X froze my system, which forced me to a hard reset. Not the best of things by itself, and it's even worse on a RAID system --now i'm going through several hours of having a slow system while RAID is in the process of rebuilding. Thank you, Gentoo devs.

arnvidr · l33t Joined: 19 Aug 2004 Posts: 629 Location: Oslo, Norway

xaviermiller · Posted: Fri Jun 02, 2017 10:34 am Post subject:

krinn · Watchman Joined: 02 May 2003 Posts: 7470

XavierMiller if it was your contribution for the "top dude award of the month", you have my vote.

orionbelt · Apprentice Joined: 05 Apr 2006 Posts: 178

arnvidr,

In my case (GeForce 8600 GT, x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-340.102-r1 and sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-4.9.16), i only needed apply the first patch (001-kernel-4.9.patch) provided by xaviermiller for kernel 4.9:

Hu · Administrator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 22657

As a minor correction/addition to your steps, I would add step 2a.: Verify that the newly created .patch file is readable by the portage user. My systems set root's umask to 027, so files created by root default to being inaccessible to unprivileged users. I have had a few times that I set up a user patch for some package (never nVidia drivers, but the principle holds regardless) where the patch defaulted to mode 640 and I forgot to change it before running emerge, causing Portage to die when trying to read the patch file.

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 9280

krinn · Watchman Joined: 02 May 2003 Posts: 7470

LTS list is easy to get, just look at kernel.org you'll see what versions are.

xaviermiller · Posted: Wed Jul 05, 2017 6:51 am Post subject:

Hi!,

Here is the patch to add for kernel 4.12:

R0b0t1 · Apprentice Joined: 05 Jun 2008 Posts: 264

Hello,

I apologize for changing the topic. Based on feedback I have seen in #gentoo and related channels the Portage documentation is rather hard to read. Most Portage knowledge is passed via word of mouth and in general it seems hard to cite the documentation (no answers typically do this, except broad answers about a topic).

I think there are two causes for this:

Portage is complex like the OP suggests. On some level it is always hard to link a goal with the information that is in the documentation. Most documentation can't cover every goal; it can only describe the software it is for.
Portage is a moving target. Features change frequently and this is usually not reflected in documentation. A good example is /etc/portage/package.use and family - it is possible to find widely cited advice that uses three or more recent notations.

That said I don't know a good way to fix any of it. There might not be anything to fix. Some of the complaints brought up in this thread seem to be applicable to the difficulty of managing a modern Linux installation. Needless to say managing a Linux installation is harder without Portage.

If you use a distribution like Debian or Ubuntu and aim to make use of the latest features you will quickly find yourself doing what Portage does, but without Portage.