Hardware Upgrade (Motherboard/CPU/RAM)

slackline

Hi,

Order some new hardware to upgrade my ageing system and would appreciate any tips/pointers to my (broad) plan....

Take existing computer apart
Rebuild with new components and existing HDs (1 SSD for OS, 2 X 3TB RAID1)
Boot computer from a live disc (usually use SystemRescueCD).
chroot into the existing install
Build a new kernel specific to the new hardware, installing the initramfs (to support RAID on boot) and kernel image to/with GRUB2
Modify /etc/portage/make.conf to reflect the new hardware.
Re-emerge everything (emerge -e @system)
Leave things along for half-a-day or so.
Exit chrooted environment and reboot my system

Thats my broad understanding of how I'd go about upgrading the system, is it reasonable/feasible? I realise its a bit sparse on details but I'm familiar with the Handbook and don't see much point in retyping it all.

Hardware wise I've gone for...

Asus Z170-PRO ATX LGA1151
Intel i7-6700 @ 3.4Ghz Quad-Core Processor
Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR4-3000

...and I'll obviously need to work out what kernel options to use for this. In the past I've used genkernel as guidance and then over time trimmed out unnecessary modules. Are there any features/kernel options I should look out for?

I realise this is kind of a vague post but if anyone has experience of upgrading in this manner I'd be interested to hear what you think of my planned strategy.

Thanks in advance,

slackline
_________________
"Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do." - Donald Knuth

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Tue Dec 06, 2016 8:57 pm Post subject:

slackline,

Unplug the mains lead from the old computer. Plug a new computer into it :)

Its not quite so simple unless your new system can run the code built for your old system. If that's true, your post is correct.

Should you be switching between Intel and AMD, its probably not true because they have different (incompatible) instruction set extensions.
In this case, you need to build at least the @system set and kernel with CPU agnostic CFLAGS before you switch.
That way you have a toolchain than works in both places. If your GUI is broken in its new home, not to worry.

Once you have migrated, you can go back to -march=native, rebuild the @system set and anything else that fails with an illegal instruction exception.
Don't forget to update your CPU_FLAGS_X86= for the new CPU.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

slackline · Posted: Tue Dec 06, 2016 9:47 pm Post subject:

Thanks Neddy thats really useful (as always).

Glaringly obvious omission of the existing hardware I'm migrating from. :oops:

My current hardware is...

CPU : Intel Core2 CPU E8400 @ 3.00GHz
RAM : 6Gb DIMM 800Mhz
Motherboard : Gigabyte X48-DSX

(I know the key is the CPU architecture though)

So I'm not transitioning from AMD, but I guess it might be sensible to rebuild my system with agnostic CFLAGS anyway as whilst a bit of a pain it could help avoid some problems.

Not having desktop/sound/etc. working I can resolve after I've a system that boots, done it a few times over now. I know I'll have to sort out VIDEO_CARD and associated Xorg stuff, but have a good idea what I'm doing there (and theres always the Wiki to consult).

Thank you very much for your advice, really useful.

slackline

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Tue Dec 06, 2016 10:26 pm Post subject:

slackline,

Intel to Intel should be fairly painless. AMD to AMD can loose 3Dnow! and 3Dnowext. That breaks multimedia stoff.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

papu · Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2016 2:30 pm Post subject:

3 weeks ago i update my cpu-ram-motherboard-box

i just compile from 0 , i use gentoo-sources( 4.8.12-gentoo-r1 x86_64) and make oldconfig from last .config

make.conf --> https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-7687980.html#7687980

only think that not working is intel-iommu suport aka--> vt-d , that i want to test for do a PCI passthrough
then i am much interested that you have same problem because you are using same chipset and a intel skylake like me.

slackline · Posted: Fri Dec 30, 2016 9:50 am Post subject:

Short update, upgrade went smoothly (bar not plugging in the 12V power supply for the CPU first time, oops :oops:

).

Didn't have to use a Live distro and chroot either, system booted, although Xorg was a bit wonky until I'd emerged x11-drivers/xf86-video-intel having switched to the onboard graphics card. Needed to compile drivers for the network card and sound card but pretty functional now.

Once the niggles were sorted I ran an 'emerge -e @world' and it flew through recompiling and installing 1387 packages in a fraction over 12hrs (which is almost as long as it took to compile Chromium!). Fresh kernel compiled too.

RAM wasn't detected a full speed but seems that was a BIOS issue. WOL isn't currently working which will again be down to BIOS (since I've had WOL support in kernel for sometime now). Couple of pieces of hardware are reported as not currently supported in the output of lshw so some digging to do to work out what I need to do there, not immediately clear to me what they are, but the second might be some aspect of controlling the memory in some manner (speed/frequency as I reconfigured in the BIOS).