Installing Gentoo 2004.3: Stage 1 NPTL on a Stage 3 Tarball

[Bob P]

NOTICE: This version of the Stage 1/3 Guide is DEPRECATED. The current version is located >> HERE <<.

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The Text of This Tutorial is Copyright 2005 by Bob P and The Jackass! Project. All Rights Reserved.

Stage 1/3 Guide for 2005.0 Now Available. Click Here.



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Stage 1/3 Installation for Gentoo 2004.3

WARNING: This is an ADVANCED installation method. The amount of time required for you to complete this type of installation will equal or exceed that of any other Gentoo installation method. Your time will be well invested, though, as the result will be a very stable Gentoo system. This installation method may prove to be somewhat difficult and cumbersome for users who are new to Gentoo. It will prove especially painful for users who plan to install Gentoo old hardware.

NOTE: The Documentation, Tips & Tricks Forum is NOT a support forum. If you should encounter problems during your Gentoo installation, please DO NOT post requests for assistance to this thread. Please seek help in the support thread that is dedicated to this installation method.


Faster than a Speeding Bullet... More Powerful than a Locomotive!

How To Build a Fast and Bulletproof Gentoo System -- Stage 1 NPTL Installation on a Stage 3 Tarball Using GCC 3.4.3

Introduction

Any Gentoo installation that is performed with anything other than a Stage 3 tarball suffers from two problems: They suffer from circular dependencies within the base system, and they have the potential to leave behind unwanted files from the stage tarball because /var/db/pkg is incomplete.

As rac noted, "There are some 80+ packages in a stage1ball that are not listed in /var/db/pkg. Why? When you do your "emerge system", you would want your new toolchain to be used to compile all software. If portage sees that a particular version from the stageball is still current, it will omit it. The solution that somebody apparently chose was to make portage forget that most of this software is installed at all, which has the unfortunate side effect of making portage be unable to clean it when your "emerge system" finishes."

So it seems that there are some good reasons to never install from a Stage 1 tarball, and some good reasons to always install from a Stage 3 tarball. The good news is that you can perform a Stage 1 installation using a Stage 3 tarball and have the best of both worlds.

Objective

This Installation Guide will describe how to perform a "Stage 1 on 3" installation of Gentoo on a Pentium-class x86 platform using 2004.3 installation media, a single CD-ROM drive and a single EIDE hard disk. It will take advantage of the latest 2.6 kernels, NPTL threading, udev, and the latest GCC 3.4.3 compiler.

As you read this, you might be thinking: "Why a Pentium-class PC?" Depending upon how you look at it, the answer can be simple or complex; The simple answer is that a Pentium-class PC is the only computer that I have left that doesn't already have Gentoo installed on it, and as I write this Guide I'm working on a project to turn that PC into a linux-based a router. The complex answer relates to compatability of this installation method on a heterogeneous group of PCs; A pentium processor is probably the most recent platform that is a common ancestor for all of the x86-class processors (AMD or Intel) that Gentoo is likely to run upon.

This guide is loosely based upon a combination of the Gentoo Installation Handbook, ali3nx's Stage 1 and NPTL tutorial, and a collection of tweaks to modify these installation methods to make them compatible for installation using a Stage 3 tarball. The adaptations that were required to make these methods work well with a Stage 3 tarball became extensive enough that it seemed worthwhile to create this thread as an independent installation guide. Although most of this should look familiar, I'm adding my own ideas about specific optimizaitons that need to be made to take advantage of new features offered by the GCC 3.4.3 compiler.


To perform a Stage 1 Installation on a Stage 3 Tarball, follow these steps:


1. Download and Burn the Minimal Installation CD. The .ISO image required for the hardware used in this example is

[/dev/random]

In section 4.4.1 I think it should be fdisk /dev/hda instead of hdparm also if it's titled display partition information instead of create partitions then it really should be
fdisk -l
Other than that good job man.

Edit: Also to stay consistent with the handbook I suggest putting the kernel section before section 7.3 but that's entirely up to you.

[landon]

ehe, you mentioned yourself in the list of acknowledgements.

[Bob P]

[kimchi_sg]

Bob: the cflags u put here are really too extreme. I'm afraid some n00b will use them and find that building of toolchain b0rks on "compiler cannot create c executables". Try toning them down a lot?

[Insanity5902]

Bob - nice how-to, i was thinking of writing one just like it as this is how I installed my last server.

I think you shouldn't suggest using all those CFLAGS. They are too extreme to be used in a How-To. You should only suggest

[Bob P]

[Hauser]

I've recently built a system with gcc-3.4.3 (mainly because I want to use the '-march=pentium-m' flag) for my new laptop, the performance turns out to be quite impressive; the system was initially built on my AMD desktop (and runs on it! ), the laptop runs just as fast (pentium-m 725 1.6GHz) as the desktop system (actually the laptop feels a little bit faster for me, perhaps because it has 1G RAM!), even though my CFLAGS are pretty conservative ("-O2 -march=pentium-m -fomit-frame-pointer")
Of course I also use nptl, linux26-headers, but I've only got a few ~x86 packages:

[Hobbit_HK]

IIRC, opensp (and now also gettext) won't compile with (some of) these CFLAGS.. I don't know which one caused it to die, but when I returned to the conservative flags, everything went smooth...
Also, -fvisibility-inlines-hidden and -fvisibility=hidden are only valid for C++, and should be in CXXFLAGS

EDIT: Well, well! As soon as I moved the C++ flags to CXXFLAGS gettext compiles! You should fix that in your CFLAGS section..
_________________
- Hobbit HK

Don't use stage1\2 tarballs
Do a stage1 install from a stage3 tarball

[Insanity5902]

Bob - I haven't read that much about the 3.4 cflags but according to what you said, you should pug a disclaimer that this is for the intel arch and that it might or might not cause problems.

There are a lot of threads around the forum now with the Devs saying they are going basically disregard all bugs with agressive cflags. They say if you want to get help you will have to recompile your program with the basic flags see if the problem still exists and then post a bug on it.


I didn't mention this up there but great article.
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[Bob P]

[hielvc]

Ok Bob_Ping on my parade nice Howto. But I agree with kimchi_sg ( tell em to go put solved on rac's thread, that should slow him down some ) about the CFLAGS. But thats for people to try and see what makes them happy. My 2 cents the fewer the better and on a serious note my first year and a half useing Gentoo was on a P166 and after doing the CFLAGS shuffel many times what I finally ended up wtih was "-march=pentium -Os -pipe". It built faster and was diffently quicker loading X and useing X apps.
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[Bob P]

[kimchi_sg]

Bob: I stand corrected on the aggressiveness of these cflags.

Just a little correction to the amended CXXFLAGS... there should be a space after the curly bracket that ends the CFLAGS, and before the - that starts -fvisibility-inlines-hidden. Otherwise -fvisibility-inlines-hidden will be tacked onto the last CFLAGS option as one word.

EDIT: How about putting this one on the gentoo wiki as well?

EDIT 2: You mentioned the command to add ntp-client to the default runlevel as 'ntp-client default'... obvious omission?

[seringen]

I'm just wondering if people are actually ok with running hotplug and coldplug in the default runlevel. I've found that I've had to load them as boot runlevels as a way to actually get hal to work properly in my udev only system.

e.g. rc-update add coldplug boot #instead of default

am I really the only one with that problem/

p.s. 7.3.3 shouldn't read

[Bob P]

[Insanity5902]

This is a very nice tut. I think it has came together quite well. I have been thinking about rebuilding my desktop machine. I might print off the pdf you have and follow it word by word to see how it turns out.

(my desktop needs to be cleaned off, this was my first gentoo install and I was still naive on the ways of portage. I like the way I have my laptop set up, using x86 and only doing ~x86 for specific apps instead of a pure ~x86 and a couple of hard-masked apps )
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[Hobbit_HK]

Am I the only one failing to compile opensp with these CFLAGS? I hope I can work this out somehow.. I don't want to emerge opensp seperately with conservative flags and leave it out on every emerge -e (system|world)...
_________________
- Hobbit HK

Don't use stage1\2 tarballs
Do a stage1 install from a stage3 tarball

[deXtuX]

When emerging media-libs/id3lib-3.8.3-r3, I got unsigned char* errors which resulted in a failed compile. I was using the following cflags/cxxflags (i.e the ones suggested above):

CFLAGS="-O3 -mtune=pentium4 -march=pentium4 -fforce-addr -momit-leaf-frame-pointer -fomit-frame-pointer -frename-registers -fweb -ftracer -pipe"

CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS} -fvisibility-inlines-hidden -fvisibility=hidden"

(and gcc 3.4.3 r1)

I tried removing -fvisibility=hidden from the CXXFLAGS line and it emerged sucessfully.
Anyway, once emerge -e world is done ill try doing it again and seeing if I can post the exact error message, since I 'cleverly' managed to loose it after closing the console and overwriting the log.

[Hobbit_HK]

LOL.. You need to be really good at your work to do BOTH things..
I would post the error message, but it's several pages long... It kinda repeats itself though..

[hielvc]

Bob you should add a step somewhere after you untar the stage3 tartball. A good place would be while people are editing thier /etc/make.conf. To get a complete listing of all your emerges, no more lost errors logs you do this.

[Bob P]

thanks to you brave souls who have been testing the tut on your hardware. i haven't had the problems with the CFLAGS on my Pentium or Pentium 3 testbeds, so i wonder if this may be architecture specific. what architecture are you guys running? at any rate, it seems that the problems are consistent enough that i'm going to remove "-fvisibility=hidden" from the CXXFLAGS.

heilvc, thanks for the recommendation about make.conf. i know that i haven't posted any recommendations for make.conf yet, and failure to set it up optimally may be causing problems for people with less experience. in my make conf, i have all of those portage directory options set and the logging directory created, but you're right -- these settings should be added to the guide.

i've hesitated to post my make.conf file, though, as i normally use the "userprivs usersandbox" in FEATURES so that portage doesn't run as root. the problem with doing this, though, is that there are plenty of broken ebuilds right now that generate dyn_test errors because of faulty handling of file privileges. the workaround, at present, is to remove "userprivs usersandbox" from FEATURES, but i consider that bad practice and hard to recommend. its sort of a Catch-22. its bad form to leave those features out, but until the ebuild bugs are squashed you have to do it for the broken ebuilds to compile. i'm going to bite the bullet and post a sample make.conf and add the step for creating the logging directory. thanks.

[fbeauregard]

I think there is a typo at step 6.6

The use flag userlocales is ok (therefore the content of /etc/portage/package.use is ok) but the file should be /etc/locales.build

Cheers,
François

[Hobbit_HK]

Yeah I noticed that too...
And does anybody else have a problem compiling xorg-6.8.1?
_________________
- Hobbit HK

Don't use stage1\2 tarballs
Do a stage1 install from a stage3 tarball

[fbeauregard]

I just noticed that http://gentoo-wiki.com/NPTL suggest the nptl and the nptlonly use flags. The howto only suggest nptl. Was this on purpose or an omission?

Cheers,
François