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compucoder
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Joined: 16 Sep 2002
Posts: 246
Location: London, Canada
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 Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2003 3:59 am Post subject: Gentoo stability |
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Hey guys, been away from *nix for a while.
I am always reading up on *nix development and growth and I came across a few articles about Gentoo and its stability. Sorry - i just read them on the fly while searching and didnt save the url's
The biggest concern I see from these articles is Gentoo's stability. I was running Gentoo myself completely on my box for a few months and did get a sense of 'unstable'. Albeit this was *ALWAYS* related to X or KDE and never to cli without X.
Does anyone have an opinion on Gentoo's stability compared to other popular linux distros?
I also came across a concept in Freebsd called a 'jail' - i think I get what this means and it sounds very intriguing....anyone know anything about this concept and whether it is workable in Gentoo or if it is something that will be coming down the road?
I also seen articles detailing slackware as one of the most stable linux distro's in existence...any thoughts?
Wonder what you guys think when articles suggest Gentoo is unstable or unuseable as a server OS.
gee, combined 4 posts in one...sorry
P.S. I still love Gentoo and have very high hopes for its continuing growth and improvement! |
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Tazmanian
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Joined: 01 Jul 2003
Posts: 222
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| Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2003 4:29 am Post subject: Re: Gentoo stability |
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| compucoder wrote: | | I also came across a concept in Freebsd called a 'jail' - i think I get what this means and it sounds very intriguing....anyone know anything about this concept and whether it is workable in Gentoo or if it is something that will be coming down the road? |
If you're referring to a "chroot jail", AFAIK, that's been supported in Linux for a while now. Check out the chroot command; is that what you are referring to?
| compucoder wrote: | | Wonder what you guys think when articles suggest Gentoo is unstable or unuseable as a server OS. |
Personally, I have never had (nor have I heard of) stability problems with Gentoo. Of course, if your kernel is misconfigured, or if you're running experimental/unstable code, then all bets are off. But I'd definitely put Gentoo on a server. If you're paranoid about stability, there's even a "gs-sources" that's supposed to provide enhanced stability. |
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ectospasm
l33t
Joined: 19 Feb 2003
Posts: 711
Location: Mobile, AL, USA
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| Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2003 4:48 am Post subject: |
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I haven't had any stability problems with Gentoo, but of course I don't normally run KDE (my current wm is fluxbox). I would wager that most problems people have with stability in Gentoo is directly caused by their make.conf settings, especially setting CFLAGS too aggressively or setting ACCEPT_KEYWORDS to "~arch" by default. I'd imagine those two things by themselves account for 90% of stability problems with Gentoo. The other 10% is from hardware problems. (-;
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Tazmanian
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Joined: 01 Jul 2003
Posts: 222
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| Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2003 4:52 am Post subject: |
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| ectospasm wrote: | | I would wager that most problems people have with stability in Gentoo is directly caused by their make.conf settings, especially setting CFLAGS too aggressively or setting ACCEPT_KEYWORDS to "~arch" by default. |
Agreed. My CFLAGS is pretty basic:
| Code: | | CFLAGS="-march=pentium3 -O3 -pipe" |
I can probably get away with more aggressive settings, but I really don't know exactly what I can get away with....  |
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compucoder
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Joined: 16 Sep 2002
Posts: 246
Location: London, Canada
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| Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2003 4:55 am Post subject: |
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i dont even go -O3 myself -
-O2 at the very most - this is my typical CFLAGS
-march=pentium3 -O2 -pipe -s -fomit-frame-pointer -mmmx -msse -mfpmath=sse
i have gotten great (stable) results with these opts. |
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madchaz
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Joined: 01 Jul 2003
Posts: 993
Location: Quebec, Canada
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| Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2003 6:07 am Post subject: |
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Well, the most stable distro I know would be desbian stable. Unfortunatly, it's also the least up to date, so that leaves you with some patches missing.
Personaly, I find gentoo very stable. The very few crashes I had I could trace to either a mistake on my part or one piece of software not working properly (kmail comes to mind)
what was really nice was that because portage is so easy to use, I could usualy easily get a replacement app for those without having much to worry about. Portage makes installing, and uninstalling, software so easy compared to other distros it's not even funny.
as for the jail concept, in linux, you use chroot to build a jail. It's very usefull for "dangerous" applications. Apache comes to mind, because it as a lot of net exposure, it can be usefull to put it in a jail in a high risk environment (internet). the use of that is that if, by any chance, someone manages to actualy break it and get a shell from it, all they see is the apage directory, nothing related to the system itself. It's also good for untrusted users. you can give them access to only those files and software they need, and nothing else. (mostly using links)
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Tazmanian
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Joined: 01 Jul 2003
Posts: 222
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| Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2003 6:54 am Post subject: |
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| madchaz wrote: | | Portage makes installing, and uninstalling, software so easy compared to other distros it's not even funny. |
I'd say not so much on the uninstalling part. Sure, you can "emerge -C" the package itself, but it's a pain to figure out which of its dependencies is no longer needed. "emerge depclean" helps, but even the manpage warns that it can't be fully trusted. And, AFAICT, "emerge clean" is fairly useless.
In fact, just a few days ago, I did an "emerge -p depclean" for the first time ever, and found a slew of packages that were no longer needed, or that had multiple versions installed. This is not resulting from my installing and removing packages, but from my updating packages who's dependencies have changed. This was quite surprising....I would've expected them to be removed automagically. |
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Doomwookie
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 07 Oct 2003
Posts: 143
Location: Dayton, Oh
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| Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2003 7:19 am Post subject: |
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It is as stable as the software you plan to install on it. If there is a bug in apache in one distro, then there will be the same bug in this distro, since it is the same apache. Though gentoo is a lot faster about releasing ebuilds with the proper patches than others are about releasing new binary packages. For the most part I have found most of the stuff I have installed with gentoo more stable and easier to maintain than with other distros.
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xeon3k
n00b
Joined: 07 Dec 2003
Posts: 13
Location: perth.wa.au
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| Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2003 7:51 am Post subject: |
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| madchaz wrote: | | Well, the most stable distro I know would be desbian stable. Unfortunatly, it's also the least up to date, so that leaves you with some patches missing. |
This is not entirely true. Debian stable is very stable and it is also very secure. The Debian stable archive is still reguarly updated with the latest patches to fix any vulnerabilities. Believe it or not bugs found in older Linux software are patched when found (more than I can say for Windows  )
One of the reasons Debian is behind is that since they support more architectures than any other distribution they have to make sure that every single piece of software works on every architecture. Quite a process I can imagine!
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Cerement
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Joined: 14 Jun 2003
Posts: 404
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| Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2003 9:10 am Post subject: |
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if you want stable and secure, there's always OpenBSD  |
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olav
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Joined: 24 Aug 2003
Posts: 194
Location: Norway
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| Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2003 11:07 am Post subject: Re: Gentoo stability |
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| compucoder wrote: |
The biggest concern I see from these articles is Gentoo's stability. I was running Gentoo myself completely on my box for a few months and did get a sense of 'unstable'. Albeit this was *ALWAYS* related to X or KDE and never to cli without X.
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I agree with you on this. From time to time small problems occur in the portage tree, and although not critical, it gives me the impression of a somewhat "raw" distro. However, this does not discourage me from using Gentoo, since I am sufficiently Linux-competent to fix small problems myself (and usually an 'emerge sync' the next day will fix the problems). Furthermore: Portage, the online Gentoo community and the general sense of fun surrounding the Gentoo project are reasons enough for me to stick with this distro.
Do people use Gentoo for serious production work and mission-critical servers? I'm curious to know. |
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compucoder
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Joined: 16 Sep 2002
Posts: 246
Location: London, Canada
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| Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2003 12:43 pm Post subject: |
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| i am also curious how many people have mission critical Gentoo servers? |
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zenlunatic
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Joined: 09 Apr 2003
Posts: 312
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| Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2003 7:36 pm Post subject: |
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| Doomwookie wrote: | | IThough gentoo is a lot faster about releasing ebuilds with the proper patches than others are about releasing new binary packages. |
Can you actually prove this? Me thinks this is FUD. I'm not trolling Gentoo, just critiquing your arguement, essentially. A lot of the stuff other distro say about distro is true if you keep saying things like this. |
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Tazmanian
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Joined: 01 Jul 2003
Posts: 222
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| Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2003 8:06 pm Post subject: |
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| zenlunatic wrote: | | Doomwookie wrote: | | IThough gentoo is a lot faster about releasing ebuilds with the proper patches than others are about releasing new binary packages. |
Can you actually prove this? Me thinks this is FUD. I'm not trolling Gentoo, just critiquing your arguement, essentially. A lot of the stuff other distro say about distro is true if you keep saying things like this. |
Well, I at least have a much better time updating packages on Gentoo than I did when I was running RedHat. Back then, when I wanted to update Galeon, Mozilla, GNOME, or whatever, I always had to deal with rpm dependency hell. Usually, I ended up compiling everything myself. |
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zenlunatic
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Joined: 09 Apr 2003
Posts: 312
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| Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2004 4:38 am Post subject: |
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| Tazmanian wrote: | | zenlunatic wrote: | | Doomwookie wrote: | | IThough gentoo is a lot faster about releasing ebuilds with the proper patches than others are about releasing new binary packages. |
Can you actually prove this? Me thinks this is FUD. I'm not trolling Gentoo, just critiquing your arguement, essentially. A lot of the stuff other distro say about distro is true if you keep saying things like this. |
Well, I at least have a much better time updating packages on Gentoo than I did when I was running RedHat. Back then, when I wanted to update Galeon, Mozilla, GNOME, or whatever, I always had to deal with rpm dependency hell. Usually, I ended up compiling everything myself. |
Yeah, but his statement is very powerful with little proof. I'm not for or against Gentoo. That I don't care about. What I care about is pointing out bad arguements. How can we ever move on to a wonderful future society based on factual discourse when people make statements like this which are simply retarded? Besides their are better ways to sell Gentoo than this. THe main issue is that he is not only patronizing Gentoo, but dissing other distro's too, with FUD. Apparantly I'm the only one that cares. |
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ponds
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Joined: 06 Oct 2003
Posts: 69
Location: MSU, Starkville, MS
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| Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2004 6:17 am Post subject: Re: Gentoo stability |
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| compucoder wrote: | The biggest concern I see from these articles is Gentoo's stability. I was running Gentoo myself completely on my box for a few months and did get a sense of 'unstable'. Albeit this was *ALWAYS* related to X or KDE and never to cli without X.
Does anyone have an opinion on Gentoo's stability compared to other popular linux distros? |
The big thing you have to realize in judging stability is whether you are judging the stability of applications or the stability of the OS. In Gentoo's case, the only things that can really be measured for stability are the init scripts and portage (though the applications that portage makes don't count), also the gentoo enhanced kernel code. I've never had a problem with any of these three things, except for the possible exception of some shutdown script error in "saving random seed...".
| Quote: | | Also came across a concept in Freebsd called a 'jail' - i think I get what this means and it sounds very intriguing....anyone know anything about this concept and whether it is workable in Gentoo or if it is something that will be coming down the road? |
Jail is a slang term used to describe a chroot environment, often called a "chroot jail" as well. When you chroot to a certain path, you are unable to access files outside of that path. Chroot is often used to put users in their own jail, where they have no way of touching any system files even in the event of any permission goof-ups. It's just as possible in Linux as it is in BSD.
| Quote: | | I also seen articles detailing slackware as one of the most stable linux distro's in existence...any thoughts? |
Well you have to look at it this way. Everytime you add a feature, you put stability at risk. Anything that has 100 features is alot more likely to be unstable than something that has 5 features, because it has many more avenues to instability.
Slackware, pretty much by definition, is linux without any extra features. Since all other distros add things like Config front ends (Redhat, drake), RPMs (drake, suse, redhat), network based package management (debian and forks, gentoo, sourcemage, arch, others); they tend to be less stable. This is natural since they are more feature rich than slackware. Since they are basically slackware + something else, if anything in the "something else" has one bug, the distro is labeled as less stable than slackware.
This isn't a slackware flame, theres nothing wrong with being the "no gimmicks" distrobution, Slackware is my prime OS along with gentoo (different things for different purposes plays into that).
| Quote: | | Wonder what you guys think when articles suggest Gentoo is unstable or unuseable as a server OS. |
Gentoo systems tends to be bleeding edge. Bleeding edge tends to scare people. But it isn't gentoo thats unstable, its the bleeding edge apps. You can still download the older versions from source and compile them, just like in every other distro.
I have never had any instability with gentoo, so I'll value empirical evidence rather than marketing FUD.
| Quote: | | P.S. I still love Gentoo and have very high hopes for its continuing growth and improvement! |
I think that even if gentoo was the most unstable, crufty, featureless (READ: I don't think this) distro out there, that it would be the best. Because it has the best community, the best support, and the best userbase out there, bar none. Even if gentoo was the worst distro (it isn't), it has all the things going for it which no other distro has.
Gentoo has drive, it is going places, even if some people think it isn't there already (they are sooo wrong). Gentoo will advance at a rate twice that of any other distro in 2004. |
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aethyr
Veteran
Joined: 06 Apr 2003
Posts: 1085
Location: NYC
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| Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2004 6:26 am Post subject: |
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| zenlunatic wrote: | | How can we ever move on to a wonderful future society based on factual discourse when people make statements like this which are simply retarded? |
Wow, that's the most blindly optimistic statement I've read so far in 2004 ;)
Anyways, about Gentoo stability, I've found that stability depends on a combination of hardware support, package versions, and gcc flags. Personally, my computer is fairly vanilla and a few years old, and everything is supported very well. Also, I tend to use packages from the stable branch, with the exception of a few hand-picked ~x86 packages. I also never use "emerge -u world" and I only update packages when necessary/desired. Finally, I use fairly conservative gcc flags.
I've found my system to be exceedingly stable, and I believe it's a combination of all those factors. |
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Doomwookie
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 07 Oct 2003
Posts: 143
Location: Dayton, Oh
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| Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2004 9:09 am Post subject: |
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| zenlunatic wrote: | | Tazmanian wrote: | | zenlunatic wrote: | | Doomwookie wrote: | | IThough gentoo is a lot faster about releasing ebuilds with the proper patches than others are about releasing new binary packages. |
Can you actually prove this? Me thinks this is FUD. I'm not trolling Gentoo, just critiquing your arguement, essentially. A lot of the stuff other distro say about distro is true if you keep saying things like this. |
Well, I at least have a much better time updating packages on Gentoo than I did when I was running RedHat. Back then, when I wanted to update Galeon, Mozilla, GNOME, or whatever, I always had to deal with rpm dependency hell. Usually, I ended up compiling everything myself. |
Yeah, but his statement is very powerful with little proof. I'm not for or against Gentoo. That I don't care about. What I care about is pointing out bad arguements. How can we ever move on to a wonderful future society based on factual discourse when people make statements like this which are simply retarded? Besides their are better ways to sell Gentoo than this. THe main issue is that he is not only patronizing Gentoo, but dissing other distro's too, with FUD. Apparantly I'm the only one that cares. |
Back when I was bouncing between redhat and mandrake, there would usually be a week or two wait for an official rpm on their mirrors with the release of a new app or security fix. Granted, they were sometimes faster about releasing the really critical security fixs, that was still roughly a week wait. Of course you could manually patch and recompile the apps from the source, but that seems to really kill the point of using a distro with a binary packaging system. With gentoo there seems to be about a 3 day or often less turn around for an updated or new ebuild getting into portage.
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wilburpan
l33t
Joined: 21 Jan 2003
Posts: 977
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| Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2004 9:52 pm Post subject: |
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How about this as a measure of stability:
With every single binary/rpm-based distro I've tried before using Gentoo, I have managed to break the distro with my only way of recovering the distro being a reinstall.
With Gentoo, I've royally screwed things up by:
trying new packages,
new versions of packages,
new alpha prereleases of packages,
making unbootable kernels,
screwing up my /boot partition
screwing up grub
but have always been able to recover from my stupidity without reinstalling the whole thing. I can always easily remove the offending program with emerge unmerge.
Except for now: while messing around with trying to figure out the nuts and bolts of how portage masks packages, I managed to delete my /var/db/pkg directory  , and I have not found another way of recreating it other than emerge world. I guess this technically is a reinstallation, but I can also look at this as an opportunity to recompile my system with my new CFLAGS that I switched to about 2 months ago.
In any case, I still am able to fix these issues from within Gentoo, which means that Gentoo is stable enough to recover from some pretty big disasters.
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GeneralKane
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 19 Aug 2003
Posts: 77
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| Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2004 10:49 pm Post subject: |
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| actually i would suggest that should work oh i hope im not too late |
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Ari Rahikkala
Guru
Joined: 02 Oct 2002
Posts: 370
Location: Finland
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| Posted: Wed Jan 07, 2004 1:39 am Post subject: |
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FreeBSD's jail is not merely chroot. It affects not only what files a process can see/access, but also what network resources it can use, what processes it can see, etc. Have a look at http://docs.freebsd.org/44doc/papers/jail/jail.html .
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