Mailing List Archive

How much value does llvm provide for a low-use laptop?
My wife is not looking for high performance and the machine uses
nvidia-drivers. (If it matters)

As best I can tell using equery the only package that seems to want it is
mesa and there's a llvm flag implying maybe I can turn it off. I'm updating
her machine and it's been grinding away on this one package for over 2
hours now. If it's not really required then I'd like to write it out of my
future.

Thanks in advance,
Mark
Re: How much value does llvm provide for a low-use laptop? [ In reply to ]
Mark Knecht posted on Sat, 15 Apr 2017 17:45:43 -0700 as excerpted:

> My wife is not looking for high performance and the machine uses
> nvidia-drivers. (If it matters)
>
> As best I can tell using equery the only package that seems to want it
> is mesa and there's a llvm flag implying maybe I can turn it off. I'm
> updating her machine and it's been grinding away on this one package for
> over 2 hours now. If it's not really required then I'd like to write it
> out of my future.

Please turn off the HTML posts.

General:

LLVM is a compiler, like gcc, but newer so in some cases not as
optimizing and licensed differently. Developers and some maintainers
like it because being a different implementation, it detects different
problems. Of course as a result code often has to be ported to work with
it if it has previously only been built with gcc, but once that work is
done, building on both compilers is a useful way to catch certain new
problems /before/ they get into actual shipped and running binaries.

Apple and the BSD folks like it because of the license. Unlike gcc,
which takes pains to make binary-blob plugins both illegal and broken,
they're allowed with llvm. So people can do the open core thing and keep
their secret sauce, whether it's super-optimizing or a useful hook for
the NSA, secret.

The llvm license also allows embedding parts of it into other programs as
JIT-compilers (just-in-time), etc, while gcc makes this problematic on
two fronts, technically gcc is simply not designed for it, it's more
monolithic and harder to suitably modularize, and legally, of course the
resulting code will need to be gplv3 or compatible licensed, as is gcc
itself, and many authors object to that. But the newer llvm code is
already more modular, and the more liberal license allows embedding in
non-gpl3-compatible code.

Specific:

The LLVM license works better with the MIT-licensed X11/Mesa/Wayland, and
they've taken advantage of this and its modularity to use it to implement
their shadow compilers and etc for newer open-gl, egl, and vulkan. This
is effectively an instance of the JIT-compiler/VM embedding mentioned in
paragraph 3 above.

LLVM is also used, via the same mesa machinery I believe, to enable opencl
(using the gpus as compute nodes to accelerate certain calculations,
probably most popularly bitcoin generation).

AMD's Radeon X11/mesa/wayland drivers to some extent and AMDGPU to a much
larger extent, depend on this this code. If you're running amdgpu
graphics, disabling this will really cripple your card and drivers if
they work at all, while with radeon, it's a bit more optional and indeed
unnecessary for the older cards, while the newer cards make use of it for
some opengl features (but AFAIK radeon isn't getting vulkan at all).

If you're not using radeon/amdgpu, you can probably disable it with
little consequence.

--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
Re: How much value does llvm provide for a low-use laptop? [ In reply to ]
Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net> wrote:
>
> If you're not using radeon/amdgpu, you can probably disable it with
> little consequence.

Googleearth on intel's graphics card becomes unusable slow
if mesa is compiled without llvm.
Re: How much value does llvm provide for a low-use laptop? [ In reply to ]
Martin Vaeth posted on Sun, 16 Apr 2017 18:01:00 +0000 as excerpted:

> Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net> wrote:
>>
>> If you're not using radeon/amdgpu, you can probably disable it with
>> little consequence.
>
> Googleearth on intel's graphics card becomes unusable slow if mesa is
> compiled without llvm.

Thanks. I wasn't aware Intel graphics used llvm too. Now I am. =:^)

Does anyone know about nVidia graphics, both servantware and freedomware?
I'm guessing the servantware doesn't use it, but the freedomware very
well could, if both Intel and AMD are doing so.

And while we're on the topic, last I knew nVidia had no plans to do
wayland with their servantware at all. Any hints of that changing?

--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
Re: Re: How much value does llvm provide for a low-use laptop? [ In reply to ]
On Sun, Apr 16, 2017 at 8:43 AM, Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net> wrote:
>
> Mark Knecht posted on Sat, 15 Apr 2017 17:45:43 -0700 as excerpted:
>
> > My wife is not looking for high performance and the machine uses
> > nvidia-drivers. (If it matters)
> >
> > As best I can tell using equery the only package that seems to want it
> > is mesa and there's a llvm flag implying maybe I can turn it off. I'm
> > updating her machine and it's been grinding away on this one package for
> > over 2 hours now. If it's not really required then I'd like to write it
> > out of my future.
>
> Please turn off the HTML posts.
>

Other than being on my wife's machine where I haven't sent mail from I have
absolutely no idea why HTML was on. Sorry.


<Big Snip>
>
> If you're not using radeon/amdgpu, you can probably disable it with
> little consequence.
>

Thanks,
Mark
Re: Re: How much value does llvm provide for a low-use laptop? [ In reply to ]
> Please turn off the HTML posts.

His post is a multipart message containing an additional plaintext
version. If you saw the HTML version, your client is broken or
misconfigured.



--
Allan Wegan
<http://www.allanwegan.de/>
Jabber: allanwegan@ffnord.net
OTR-Fingerprint: E4DCAA40 4859428E B3912896 F2498604 8CAA126F
Jabber: allanwegan@jabber.ccc.de
OTR-Fingerprint: A1AAA1B9 C067F988 4A424D33 98343469 29164587
ICQ: 209459114
OTR-Fingerprint: 71DE5B5E 67D6D758 A93BF1CE 7DA06625 205AC6EC
Re: How much value does llvm provide for a low-use laptop? [ In reply to ]
Allan Wegan posted on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 22:31:36 +0200 as excerpted:

>> Please turn off the HTML posts.
>
> His post is a multipart message containing an additional plaintext
> version. If you saw the HTML version, your client is broken or
> misconfigured.

My client presented both versions as plain text, as arguably it should
(because some broken clients don't send an appropriate plain text version
if they're sending an HTML message).

But HTML when presented as such in mail or news is simply a vulnerability
vector waiting to be exploited, and plenty of senders do just that with
spyware (web bugs being the simplest) and malware.

So no responsible person will allow HTML mail to be processed and
displayed as such on their machines, which in turn means no responsible
person should choose to send it.

Of course there's also the argument that some on the list may be paying
by the MB/GB, and sending HTML alone, and even more /both/ HTML and plain
text, bloats the message and thus the price they pay.

Both of these for no reason but selfishness and the want to abuse others
just because one can, or in best case (which I believe this was), because
the sender simply didn't care enough about their readers to actually
check and see, before sending.

--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
Re: Re: How much value does llvm provide for a low-use laptop? [ In reply to ]
>>> Please turn off the HTML posts.
>> His post is a multipart message containing an additional plaintext
>> version. If you saw the HTML version, your client is broken or
>> misconfigured.

> My client presented both versions as plain text, as arguably it
> should (because some broken clients don't send an appropriate plain
> text version if they're sending an HTML message).

The rare cases with no plaintext part can be handled by switching to the
source view. That cases are easily detected by the absence of any body
text in the plaintext view.

> But HTML when presented as such in mail or news is simply a
> vulnerability vector waiting to be exploited, and plenty of senders
> do just that with spyware (web bugs being the simplest) and malware.

Of course it is. Everything, that gets interpreted in any way, is
(including the whole email).

> So no responsible person will allow HTML mail to be processed and
> displayed as such on their machines, which in turn means no
> responsible person should choose to send it.

So you chosed to not process HTML in emails because of the security
implications. That is fine (even if it leaves me wondering how the web
looks like on your machine).

I dislike HTML in emails too (mostly because of common convoluted table
designs and ugly font/color choices). But others seem to like it and so
they use it. They either do not care or come to other conclusions
regarding the buggyness of current HTML/image parsers and the uglyness
of most HTML mails out there...
Fortunately one can chose whether to display that HTML or not - even if
some obviously have chosen to not use that freedom.

HTML mail is all about choice too.



--
Allan Wegan
<http://www.allanwegan.de/>
Jabber: allanwegan@ffnord.net
OTR-Fingerprint: E4DCAA40 4859428E B3912896 F2498604 8CAA126F
Jabber: allanwegan@jabber.ccc.de
OTR-Fingerprint: A1AAA1B9 C067F988 4A424D33 98343469 29164587
ICQ: 209459114
OTR-Fingerprint: 71DE5B5E 67D6D758 A93BF1CE 7DA06625 205AC6EC
Re: Re: How much value does llvm provide for a low-use laptop? [ In reply to ]
On Mon, Apr 17, 2017 at 7:44 PM, Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net> wrote:
<SNIP>
> or in best case (which I believe this was), because
> the sender simply didn't care enough about their readers to actually
> check and see, before sending.
>
> --
> Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
> "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
> and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
>
>

Geez Duncan, get over it. I don't send HTML by default and you know that.
If you don't want to read and respond then don't, but get over the idea
that you alone are the keeper of what's right for 7 billion people on the
Internet and move on. I told you I was on a different computer at the time.
I apologized for the email. For most anyone that would be enough. As it's
not enough for you then I apologize again for my really, really, really
horrible mistake.

Anyway, enough said on this topic.

Good night
Re: How much value does llvm provide for a low-use laptop? [ In reply to ]
Mark Knecht posted on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 21:15:00 -0700 as excerpted:

> Geez Duncan, get over it.

I was over it. One sentence request as I was answering the question that
was asked. That was it.

Until someone (not you!) questioned that one sentence request and I
needed to fill in the reasoning behind it.

> I don't send HTML by default and you know that.

+1 =:^)

> If you don't want to read and respond then don't, but get over the idea
> that you alone are the keeper of what's right for 7 billion people on
> the Internet and move on.

I have a simple rule. When I reply to an HTML mail, I ask that people
turn it off. But only if I'm replying for other reasons, and it's
normally short and polite. As it was here. (Tho sometimes I explain why
in the first post too, but I still try to keep it brief and to the
point... relatively, for my posts, anyway.)

If it happens repeatedly, I may killfile. But I don't at first, because
I've found the short request, making people aware of the problem, is
often enough to get them to fix it, especially if I'm answering as best I
can whatever else at the same time. =:^)

FWIW, I actually believe people have the /right/ to post in html if they
wish, but I have the right to ask them to stop, too, and to killfile if
they ultimately don't. Fortunately, I don't often need to do so, because
as I said, most people aren't too assertive of that /right/ if asked
nicely by someone trying to answer their posted question at the same time.

Of course it sometimes gets a longer discussion going too or instead, as
it did here.

--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
Re: Re: How much value does llvm provide for a low-use laptop? [ In reply to ]
Duncan wrote:
> Mark Knecht posted on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 21:15:00 -0700 as excerpted:
>
>> Geez Duncan, get over it.
> I was over it. One sentence request as I was answering the question that
> was asked. That was it.
>
> Until someone (not you!) questioned that one sentence request and I
> needed to fill in the reasoning behind it.
>
>> I don't send HTML by default and you know that.
> +1 =:^)
>
>> If you don't want to read and respond then don't, but get over the idea
>> that you alone are the keeper of what's right for 7 billion people on
>> the Internet and move on.
> I have a simple rule. When I reply to an HTML mail, I ask that people
> turn it off. But only if I'm replying for other reasons, and it's
> normally short and polite. As it was here. (Tho sometimes I explain why
> in the first post too, but I still try to keep it brief and to the
> point... relatively, for my posts, anyway.)
>
> If it happens repeatedly, I may killfile. But I don't at first, because
> I've found the short request, making people aware of the problem, is
> often enough to get them to fix it, especially if I'm answering as best I
> can whatever else at the same time. =:^)
>
> FWIW, I actually believe people have the /right/ to post in html if they
> wish, but I have the right to ask them to stop, too, and to killfile if
> they ultimately don't. Fortunately, I don't often need to do so, because
> as I said, most people aren't too assertive of that /right/ if asked
> nicely by someone trying to answer their posted question at the same time.
>
> Of course it sometimes gets a longer discussion going too or instead, as
> it did here.
>


Most on Gentoo mailing lists expect text only. A lot of people do the
same, killfile, filter etc, if a person sends HTML. To ignore what is
expected on a Gentoo mailing list only hurts the person ignoring it.
The person that killfiled, filters etc the person may have the solution
to the problem. Since they no longer see the email, they won't answer it.

If you see me sending HTML only, let me know. I have mine set to send
plain text but I've had a time or two where a upgrade has messed that
up. Generally, someone points it out and I go fix it.

Dale

:-) :-)
Re: Re: How much value does llvm provide for a low-use laptop? [ In reply to ]
On Montag, 17. April 2017 03:17:21 CEST Duncan wrote:
> Martin Vaeth posted on Sun, 16 Apr 2017 18:01:00 +0000 as excerpted:
> > Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net> wrote:
> >> If you're not using radeon/amdgpu, you can probably disable it with
> >> little consequence.
> >
> > Googleearth on intel's graphics card becomes unusable slow if mesa is
> > compiled without llvm.
>
> Thanks. I wasn't aware Intel graphics used llvm too. Now I am. =:^)

I'm not sure, but even if they didn't, AFAIK mesa uses LLVM to speed up CPU
rendering, so you would probably want it regardless (my understanding is: in
any case where a driver doesn't implement a particular OpenGL function, a
software implementation can be used instead, and that can be accelerated/
optimised by LLVM).

> Does anyone know about nVidia graphics, both servantware and freedomware?
> I'm guessing the servantware doesn't use it, but the freedomware very
> well could, if both Intel and AMD are doing so.

I would be surprised if the nouveau driver didn't use LLVM, too, but I don't
know for sure. No idea about nvidia.

> And while we're on the topic, last I knew nVidia had no plans to do
> wayland with their servantware at all. Any hints of that changing?

No idea, sorry (also, I don't care ;-) ).

Greetings
--
Marc Joliet
--
"People who think they know everything really annoy those of us who know we
don't" - Bjarne Stroustrup
Re: Re: How much value does llvm provide for a low-use laptop? [ In reply to ]
On Tue, Apr 18, 2017 at 1:04 PM, Marc Joliet <marcec@gmx.de> wrote:
>
> On Montag, 17. April 2017 03:17:21 CEST Duncan wrote:
> > Martin Vaeth posted on Sun, 16 Apr 2017 18:01:00 +0000 as excerpted:
> > > Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net> wrote:
> > >> If you're not using radeon/amdgpu, you can probably disable it with
> > >> little consequence.
> > >
> > > Googleearth on intel's graphics card becomes unusable slow if mesa is
> > > compiled without llvm.
> >
> > Thanks. I wasn't aware Intel graphics used llvm too. Now I am. =:^)
>
> I'm not sure, but even if they didn't, AFAIK mesa uses LLVM to speed up
CPU
> rendering, so you would probably want it regardless (my understanding is:
in
> any case where a driver doesn't implement a particular OpenGL function, a
> software implementation can be used instead, and that can be accelerated/
> optimised by LLVM).
>
> > Does anyone know about nVidia graphics, both servantware and
freedomware?
> > I'm guessing the servantware doesn't use it, but the freedomware very
> > well could, if both Intel and AMD are doing so.
>
> I would be surprised if the nouveau driver didn't use LLVM, too, but I
don't
> know for sure. No idea about nvidia.
>
> > And while we're on the topic, last I knew nVidia had no plans to do
> > wayland with their servantware at all. Any hints of that changing?
>
> No idea, sorry (also, I don't care ;-) ).
>
> Greetings
> --
> Marc Joliet

Just a follow-up.

I got rid of llvm on my Gentoo nvidia machine and so far see no ill
effects. Granted, I'm using an i7 980 Extreme, 24GB with an nvidia
960-based card, so it's pretty good hardware but I've seen no ill effects
so far.

Additionally, with Google releasing Google Earth as a web app at least
inside of Chrome it runs fine. Pan/zoom/tilt 3D views of the world. Lots of
fun and if it was faster with llvm I don't think I'd notice it.

As for my wife's laptop which started this discussion I had an emerge 2
weeks ago of about 200 packages, mostly KDE, which took almost 24 hours to
build on a 5-6 year old laptop.This time around I have about 175 packages
today. We'll see how long it takes as a data point but I've decided to move
her to Ubuntu. I think I need to be spending my time more productively than
building this much code this often. I already run Ubuntu as a VM on my
Gentoo machine due to apps not supported (or not building correctly) by
Gentoo in portage. Sad as it will be the first non-Gentoo boot in my house
in about 15 years.
Re: How much value does llvm provide for a low-use laptop? [ In reply to ]
Mark Knecht posted on Sat, 22 Apr 2017 11:38:59 -0700 as excerpted:

> As for my wife's laptop which started this discussion I had an emerge 2
> weeks ago of about 200 packages, mostly KDE, which took almost 24 hours
> to build on a 5-6 year old laptop.This time around I have about 175
> packages today. We'll see how long it takes as a data point but I've
> decided to move her to Ubuntu. I think I need to be spending my time
> more productively than building this much code this often. I already run
> Ubuntu as a VM on my Gentoo machine due to apps not supported (or not
> building correctly) by Gentoo in portage. Sad as it will be the first
> non-Gentoo boot in my house in about 15 years.

Is her laptop 64-bit or only 32-bit? Either way, how many other machines
of similar bitness do you have around? (I'm presuming all x86 or amd64,
no arm/mips/ppc/whatever.)

Some time ago I had a 32-bit netbook and my 64-bit main machine. I
update the main machine frequently, often a couple times or more a week,
but found myself falling behind on the netbook (which I built in a 32-bit
chroot on the main machine and secure-rsynced over), not updating it for
a year or more at a time, sometimes, so it was a *BIG* job when I finally
/did/ update. (FWIW, there was, very deliberately, nothing private on
the netbook, and contrary to the name, it wasn't net-connected most of
the time anyway, so I wasn't really worried about the security
implications of not updating for that long.)

My takeaway from that was to make everything the same arch, loosen up the
c(xx)flags somewhat to build a bit more generically, adjust USE flags to
be a bit more generic as well, and do binpkg builds which I can then
emerge -k onto all machines. That way I'm building most things just
once, altho I imagine I'd customize USE flags and/or c(xx)flags on a few
packages.

I haven't really gotten the other machines yet that I have in mind, but
ultimately, I want, probably, a repurposed chromebook for portability,
and a small, effectively embedded system with a bunch of gigabit ethernet
ports and wifi, for a router. Thus the message I posted here a couple
years ago, getting ideas. (I got a bunch for the router, not so much for
the chromebook replacement or similar.)

So obviously I've not set it up yet, but the idea is sound. If I have
more than one machine, make sure they're all the same arch and build most
things just once, to install on everything from the router to the
netbooks to the main machines. After the first build, presumably on the
main machine, everything else in common at least would be either binpkg
updates, or perhaps rsync updates.

Of course if her machine is 32-bit x86 and it's the only one you have,
you're in the bind I was in and can't really share with anything else.
But you can still setup a 32-bit chroot on your presumably faster main
build machine and build there, so at least the builds shouldn't take as
long... unless of course you let it get a year-plus behind, like I did,
and have to figure out how to actually get all the updates thru once you
/do/ update.

But having been there, if it's about your only 32-bit only machine or is
otherwise the odd one out, I wouldn't blame you at all for sticking
whatever binary-based distro on it. Tho FWIW I'd probably make it arch,
not ubuntu, but that's just me. If ubuntu's more her, or your, style, go
with it! =:^)

--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
Re: Re: How much value does llvm provide for a low-use laptop? [ In reply to ]
On Sun, Apr 23, 2017 at 5:18 AM, Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net> wrote:
>
> Mark Knecht posted on Sat, 22 Apr 2017 11:38:59 -0700 as excerpted:
>
> > As for my wife's laptop which started this discussion I had an emerge 2
> > weeks ago of about 200 packages, mostly KDE, which took almost 24 hours
> > to build on a 5-6 year old laptop.This time around I have about 175
> > packages today. We'll see how long it takes as a data point but I've
> > decided to move her to Ubuntu. I think I need to be spending my time
> > more productively than building this much code this often. I already run
> > Ubuntu as a VM on my Gentoo machine due to apps not supported (or not
> > building correctly) by Gentoo in portage. Sad as it will be the first
> > non-Gentoo boot in my house in about 15 years.
>
> Is her laptop 64-bit or only 32-bit? Either way, how many other machines
> of similar bitness do you have around? (I'm presuming all x86 or amd64,
> no arm/mips/ppc/whatever.)

Her laptop is an 64-bit i7 Q740 processor @ 1.73G. 8GB DRAM, two
500MB drives. It was sold as a Gaming Laptop probably 5 years ago

I already keep the CPU and USE flags pretty similar.

I certainly could chroot a specific copy of Gentoo and build on my
machine. I might also be able to build binary packages on my fast
machine and then do an emerge -k type install and see if it works.

However, in the end how much do I gain for all that work vs installing
Kubuntu? The Gentoo portage overlay environment sort of comes and
goes depending on what overlay and how interested someone is in
supporting it. For my needs, and certainly for my wife's needs, Ubuntu
is supporting all the apps I need. I had problems with Handbrake on
Gentoo for over a year. No one fixed it. I created an Unbuntu VM
and just run it in there. Updating that VM is no more than 1-2 minutes
a week for the last few months. It does feel foreign compared to years
of running portage, but it works just fine.

I have this Ubuntu 64-bit VM and I have a 64-bit Gentoo VM on my big
machine. I cannot measure any real speed differences in the two VMs
so I doubt I'll see any big differences on her laptop, at least not such
that the wife would complain about it. It's more about that it boots up,
goes to the network and is easy to backup her data. She uses Chrome,
OpenOffice and not much else.

I've really not figured out the whole developer tools/kernel build process
on Ubuntu but if it was ever important I'm sure the info is out there. For
her machine it's a non-issue. For my big machine it would be more
important as I'm heavily RAID-ed but I'm not ready to dump Gentoo on
this box quite yet, but I think it's coming. I use Matlab with a lot of
NVidia
GPU coding and neither work perfectly on Gentoo. (But both are very
good.)

Anyway, I think the writing it on the wall. My machines are just tools
these days. Not so much into tinkering anymore with this stuff.

Thanks for the inputs.

Cheers,
Mark
Re: How much value does llvm provide for a low-use laptop? [ In reply to ]
Mark Knecht posted on Mon, 24 Apr 2017 08:36:43 -0700 as excerpted:

> I certainly could chroot a specific copy of Gentoo and build on my
> machine. I might also be able to build binary packages on my fast
> machine and then do an emerge -k type install and see if it works.
>
> However, in the end how much do I gain for all that work vs installing
> Kubuntu?

There's some advantage in learning one distro, learning it well, and
using it on everything. That's what you gain, assuming you're keeping
everything else on gentoo, as you then don't need to keep track of the
many distro differences.

I learned the difficulty of dealing with multiple distros here with my
current router, still an old Linksys wrt54gl (which as I said I intend to
eventually upgrade to an amd64, so I can build for it at the same time as
the rest of my systems, can configure it using the same methods and
tools, etc.), running openwrt.

I had a horrible time trying to configure its networking system the way I
wanted to, basically having to read a bunch of its init system scripts
and config to figure out what started what, in what order, what and how
to modify that to my liking, etc, pretty much just to figure out what
config file to edit to change a few settings I wanted to change.

Even then, I felt like I wasn't getting the most out of it, because in
ordered to do that I'd have had to read and understand pretty much the
entire init system. So mainly I just stuck with the defaults instead of
really getting it to work how I wanted, and I never did really /truly/
understand it.

Now that version is now long outdated, but I don't want to update or
indeed, to really change the config as I set it up back then, because in
ordered to do so I'm going to have to dive back into things and figure
all that stuff out again. But I'll only be using it on that one thing;
the info and skills gained won't really transfer to anything else, unless
I decide to standardize on openwrt for everything, including my main
machines!

By contrast, if it was gentoo, I would have already known the basics and
could have gotten right to the task at hand. And I could have and likely
would have done far more with it, because I really do understand the
openrc setup (this was before systemd went mainstream).

These days of course most distros are standardized on systemd for init,
so learn it once, use it on all. And that's one of the reasons why I
eventually switched to systemd on gentoo. Except, particularly for that
old thing with its extremely limited system image and RAM sizes, I don't
think systemd would fit. Which is probably a good share of the reason
that last I heard anyway, openwrt wasn't switching to systemd.

Between my dissatisfaction with not being able to truly master the openwrt
system in the time I was willing to devote to it as a one-off, and my
dissatisfaction with having to build separately for my netbook, even if
it was gentoo, I resolved, as I explained, that next time I upgraded
things, I'd standardize on amd64 (Intel or AMD chips either one), and try
to keep things similar enough that at least for most packages, I could
use the same C(XX)FLAGS and USE flags for everything, and just do binpkg-
only emerges on systems other than my primary, for most packages. That
way both the packages and the setup would be the same across everything,
except where I had actual reason to make it different. And I'd really
understand both that setup, and how to change it to accomplish what I
wanted to do, if necessary.


Now I'm into customizing enough that I've never met a desktop that I
liked as it was shipped, and I expect I never will. And at least as I
envision things, even if I'm 80 (30 years from now as I just turned 50
this year) and in a nursing home, if I'm still of sound enough mind and
body to be running computers, now that I know the level to which I can
efficiently customize gentoo, I really can't see myself being happy
within the limitations of a normal binary distro an longer. It's not as
emphatic a "won't ever happen" as the idea of me switching back to
something proprietary like MS Windows or Apple OSX, but for me it would
certainly feel like going in the same direction, and would thus feel like
defeat. At that point, if I can't any longer do gentoo or at least arch,
I may well simply turn in the keyboard and mouse, and if I do that, I
can't imagine I'd have much else to do to keep me happy, so
realistically, I might well wither and die within a few months, figuring
I have little to nothing remaining to live for.


Now I'm /not/ saying the answer has to be the same for you. Far from
it! In fact, the above sounds like you may be tilting the other way,
toward making everything (k)ubuntu, and giving up on gentoo. If you're
satisfied with (k)ubuntu, standardizing on it would equally as
effectively solve the problem of having to deal with two different
distros with wildly different ways of doing things. And that may work
very well for you.

But it definitely wouldn't work for me. I couldn't be happy on (k)ubuntu,
or fedora, or... I left those limitations behind in 2004 when I left
mandrake for gentoo, much as I left the limitations of proprietaryware
behind in 2001, when I left MS as eXPrivacy crossed a line I couldn't and
wouldn't cross, for the land of Linux freedomware, where I'd not be
/asked/ or /expected/ to cross such a line in the first place.

Of course doing a split across multiple distros is possible too, but it
does have its negatives, which I'm trying to point out here, and for me
anyway, those negatives were high enough that while I lived with them
while I had to, I resolved that when I got new hardware, I wouldn't have
to any longer.

But of course perhaps that too you'll find less of a problem than I did.
I just don't like being jack of all distros and master of none, is all,
and would prefer to master one distro, ideally a really flexible one like
gentoo, knowing it well enough to comfortably make it do what I want, and
use it everywhere.

--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
Re: Re: How much value does llvm provide for a low-use laptop? [ In reply to ]
On Tue, Apr 25, 2017 at 1:57 AM, Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net> wrote:
>
> Mark Knecht posted on Mon, 24 Apr 2017 08:36:43 -0700 as excerpted:
>
> > I certainly could chroot a specific copy of Gentoo and build on my
> > machine. I might also be able to build binary packages on my fast
> > machine and then do an emerge -k type install and see if it works.
> >
> > However, in the end how much do I gain for all that work vs installing
> > Kubuntu?
>
> There's some advantage in learning one distro, learning it well, and
> using it on everything. That's what you gain, assuming you're keeping
> everything else on gentoo, as you then don't need to keep track of the
> many distro differences.
>
> I learned the difficulty of dealing with multiple distros here with my
> current router, still an old Linksys wrt54gl (which as I said I intend to
> eventually upgrade to an amd64, so I can build for it at the same time as
> the rest of my systems, can configure it using the same methods and
> tools, etc.), running openwrt.
>
> I had a horrible time trying to configure its networking system the way I
> wanted to, basically having to read a bunch of its init system scripts
> and config to figure out what started what, in what order, what and how
> to modify that to my liking, etc, pretty much just to figure out what
> config file to edit to change a few settings I wanted to change.
>
> Even then, I felt like I wasn't getting the most out of it, because in
> ordered to do that I'd have had to read and understand pretty much the
> entire init system. So mainly I just stuck with the defaults instead of
> really getting it to work how I wanted, and I never did really /truly/
> understand it.
>
> Now that version is now long outdated, but I don't want to update or
> indeed, to really change the config as I set it up back then, because in
> ordered to do so I'm going to have to dive back into things and figure
> all that stuff out again. But I'll only be using it on that one thing;
> the info and skills gained won't really transfer to anything else, unless
> I decide to standardize on openwrt for everything, including my main
> machines!
>
> By contrast, if it was gentoo, I would have already known the basics and
> could have gotten right to the task at hand. And I could have and likely
> would have done far more with it, because I really do understand the
> openrc setup (this was before systemd went mainstream).
>
> These days of course most distros are standardized on systemd for init,
> so learn it once, use it on all. And that's one of the reasons why I
> eventually switched to systemd on gentoo. Except, particularly for that
> old thing with its extremely limited system image and RAM sizes, I don't
> think systemd would fit. Which is probably a good share of the reason
> that last I heard anyway, openwrt wasn't switching to systemd.
>
> Between my dissatisfaction with not being able to truly master the openwrt
> system in the time I was willing to devote to it as a one-off, and my
> dissatisfaction with having to build separately for my netbook, even if
> it was gentoo, I resolved, as I explained, that next time I upgraded
> things, I'd standardize on amd64 (Intel or AMD chips either one), and try
> to keep things similar enough that at least for most packages, I could
> use the same C(XX)FLAGS and USE flags for everything, and just do binpkg-
> only emerges on systems other than my primary, for most packages. That
> way both the packages and the setup would be the same across everything,
> except where I had actual reason to make it different. And I'd really
> understand both that setup, and how to change it to accomplish what I
> wanted to do, if necessary.
>
>
> Now I'm into customizing enough that I've never met a desktop that I
> liked as it was shipped, and I expect I never will. And at least as I
> envision things, even if I'm 80 (30 years from now as I just turned 50
> this year) and in a nursing home, if I'm still of sound enough mind and
> body to be running computers, now that I know the level to which I can
> efficiently customize gentoo, I really can't see myself being happy
> within the limitations of a normal binary distro an longer. It's not as
> emphatic a "won't ever happen" as the idea of me switching back to
> something proprietary like MS Windows or Apple OSX, but for me it would
> certainly feel like going in the same direction, and would thus feel like
> defeat. At that point, if I can't any longer do gentoo or at least arch,
> I may well simply turn in the keyboard and mouse, and if I do that, I
> can't imagine I'd have much else to do to keep me happy, so
> realistically, I might well wither and die within a few months, figuring
> I have little to nothing remaining to live for.
>
>
> Now I'm /not/ saying the answer has to be the same for you. Far from
> it! In fact, the above sounds like you may be tilting the other way,
> toward making everything (k)ubuntu, and giving up on gentoo. If you're
> satisfied with (k)ubuntu, standardizing on it would equally as
> effectively solve the problem of having to deal with two different
> distros with wildly different ways of doing things. And that may work
> very well for you.
>
> But it definitely wouldn't work for me. I couldn't be happy on (k)ubuntu,
> or fedora, or... I left those limitations behind in 2004 when I left
> mandrake for gentoo, much as I left the limitations of proprietaryware
> behind in 2001, when I left MS as eXPrivacy crossed a line I couldn't and
> wouldn't cross, for the land of Linux freedomware, where I'd not be
> /asked/ or /expected/ to cross such a line in the first place.
>
> Of course doing a split across multiple distros is possible too, but it
> does have its negatives, which I'm trying to point out here, and for me
> anyway, those negatives were high enough that while I lived with them
> while I had to, I resolved that when I got new hardware, I wouldn't have
> to any longer.
>
> But of course perhaps that too you'll find less of a problem than I did.
> I just don't like being jack of all distros and master of none, is all,
> and would prefer to master one distro, ideally a really flexible one like
> gentoo, knowing it well enough to comfortably make it do what I want, and
> use it everywhere.
>

I probably should trim this response but I won't.

1) Honestly, I don't disagree at all with your views about the problems
of running multiple distros. I wish I wasn't getting pushed that way.

2) You seem to have discounted the problem that on this i7 laptop it
simply takes too much time to build KDE. I don't think most of the rest of
Gentoo is too bad, and maybe I can convince my wife to use something
else like XFCE. That would likely require a profile change, which is study
time, but the answers are probably in the forums somewhere and would
allow me to keep Gentoo on that machine.

3) Respectfully, I'm not sure your answer encompasses the problems
and frustrations of having to maintain OTHER people's computers. I don't
hear you speak of that very often. The problem with KDE is on my wife's
computer. When it's building KDE it's unavailable to her. In the past 2
weeks I've had two massive builds that each took about 24 hours. That
amounts to about 15% downtime on her machine, which personally I don't
care about other than I'm the target of the gripes about 'When's my computer
going to work again', etc., and truly, what's she really getting with these
updates? Answer: Almost nothing, or actually nothing.

4) In the case of my wife's machine using Kubuntu means (to me) that I
won't do updates. (Or not many) If it works when it's installed then that's
mostly what she gets. Chrome, LibreOffice, VLC. I'm not sure she uses
anything other than that anyway. It's just a PC.

And, no, I'm not thinking of moving my machine away from Gentoo (for
now) but I can honestly say that if I had a major hardware failure I don't
think I'd just jump in an put Gentoo on a new machine. Neither MatLab nor
NVidia Digits are perfectly happy on Gentoo but are fully supported on
Ubuntu.

Cheers,
Mark
Re: How much value does llvm provide for a low-use laptop? [ In reply to ]
Mark Knecht posted on Tue, 25 Apr 2017 10:43:29 -0700 as excerpted:

> 3) Respectfully, I'm not sure your answer encompasses the problems and
> frustrations of having to maintain OTHER people's computers. I don't
> hear you speak of that very often. The problem with KDE is on my wife's
> computer. When it's building KDE it's unavailable to her. In the past 2
> weeks I've had two massive builds that each took about 24 hours. That
> amounts to about 15% downtime on her machine,

What I'm trying to say, tho, is that if you set it up right, you'll only
be building once, for your machine, or at least /on/ your machine if it's
a package you don't yourself use, and will then be using already built
binpkgs on her machine.

So effectively it's like using a binary distro on everything except your
build machine, only the binary distro will be customized with your chosen
gentoo profile, USE flags, etc.

IOW, bigger picture, the gentoo as metadistro idea, with you effectively
creating the customized binary distro out of it with the build on your
machine, that you then install on your wife's machine, and however many
more you have around that you maintain or help maintain.

Now depending on how similar the machines and layouts are, you may still
end up building a /few/ packages individually for each or at least some
of the machines, but if you choose your battles (packages) well, it'll be
perhaps 10% of them, and "big" packages like gcc, firefox or chromium,
etc, will only be built once. Tho if you have say kde on some and xfce
on others, you might be building one or the other of them for perhaps one
machine only, and certainly, kde at least is big, but still, if you're
building for say 10 machines and a few packages are only used on one or
two, with another few that you have to rebuild custom for each one, you
might be building in total say 120% or 150% or even 200% of what you'd
build for a single machine, but that's still way better than the 1000%
(100% * 10) that you'd be building if you did each one individually.

And while not /exacty/ the same as you'd get with all individual builds
(the 1000%), it'd still be way closer to fully customized individual
builds then the generic target mass distribution build you'd get using a
normal binary distro.

Meanwhile, the per-machine update and admin time, for other than that
first build machine, would be very nearly the same as you'd spend with a
mass binary distro anyway, and actually possibly less than the time you'd
spend if you were splitting distros and having to keep up with the
different ways different distros did things.

At that point the update and admin time on your wife's machine would
probably be /less/ staying with gentoo, because you'd be doing binpkg
installs with already-built packages done on your main machine, and being
gentoo, you'd know it better and be more effective at admin, so you'd
actually spend less time on the admin side than you would if it were the
only machine you had running ubuntu (or fedora or whatever), and thus
dealing with any changes to config for the first and only time on her
machine.

--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
Re: Re: How much value does llvm provide for a low-use laptop? [ In reply to ]
On Wed, Apr 26, 2017 at 6:04 AM, Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net> wrote:
>
> Mark Knecht posted on Tue, 25 Apr 2017 10:43:29 -0700 as excerpted:
>
> > 3) Respectfully, I'm not sure your answer encompasses the problems and
> > frustrations of having to maintain OTHER people's computers. I don't
> > hear you speak of that very often. The problem with KDE is on my wife's
> > computer. When it's building KDE it's unavailable to her. In the past 2
> > weeks I've had two massive builds that each took about 24 hours. That
> > amounts to about 15% downtime on her machine,
>
> What I'm trying to say, tho, is that if you set it up right, you'll only
> be building once, for your machine, or at least /on/ your machine if it's
> a package you don't yourself use, and will then be using already built
> binpkgs on her machine.
>
> So effectively it's like using a binary distro on everything except your
> build machine, only the binary distro will be customized with your chosen
> gentoo profile, USE flags, etc.
>
> IOW, bigger picture, the gentoo as metadistro idea, with you effectively
> creating the customized binary distro out of it with the build on your
> machine, that you then install on your wife's machine, and however many
> more you have around that you maintain or help maintain.
>
> Now depending on how similar the machines and layouts are, you may still
> end up building a /few/ packages individually for each or at least some
> of the machines, but if you choose your battles (packages) well, it'll be
> perhaps 10% of them, and "big" packages like gcc, firefox or chromium,
> etc, will only be built once. Tho if you have say kde on some and xfce
> on others, you might be building one or the other of them for perhaps one
> machine only, and certainly, kde at least is big, but still, if you're
> building for say 10 machines and a few packages are only used on one or
> two, with another few that you have to rebuild custom for each one, you
> might be building in total say 120% or 150% or even 200% of what you'd
> build for a single machine, but that's still way better than the 1000%
> (100% * 10) that you'd be building if you did each one individually.
>
> And while not /exacty/ the same as you'd get with all individual builds
> (the 1000%), it'd still be way closer to fully customized individual
> builds then the generic target mass distribution build you'd get using a
> normal binary distro.
>
> Meanwhile, the per-machine update and admin time, for other than that
> first build machine, would be very nearly the same as you'd spend with a
> mass binary distro anyway, and actually possibly less than the time you'd
> spend if you were splitting distros and having to keep up with the
> different ways different distros did things.
>
> At that point the update and admin time on your wife's machine would
> probably be /less/ staying with gentoo, because you'd be doing binpkg
> installs with already-built packages done on your main machine, and being
> gentoo, you'd know it better and be more effective at admin, so you'd
> actually spend less time on the admin side than you would if it were the
> only machine you had running ubuntu (or fedora or whatever), and thus
> dealing with any changes to config for the first and only time on her
> machine.
>

Yeah, I think the idea is at least worth investigating. However this is one
of
those ideas that I always thought sounded good on paper but would likely
be a problem in real life. However maybe these machines are close enough
to make it a good option.

Other than the aes flag the two CPUs appear to support the same features. I
have no idea how that maps into system performance or application space.
I'll
have to research that a bit. Not using it might make my machine a little
slower
on web pages or something like that but I doubt I'll see it. I could
investigate
turning that off and seeing what my machine wants to rebuild. On the other
hand, it might make a bigger difference inside the Windows VMs.

mark@c2RAID6 ~ $ cpuinfo2cpuflags-x86
CPU_FLAGS_X86="aes mmx mmxext popcnt sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3"
mark@c2RAID6 ~ $ ssh laptop
Password:
mark@slinky ~ $ cpuinfo2cpuflags-x86
CPU_FLAGS_X86="mmx mmxext popcnt sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3"
mark@slinky ~ $

I'll need to see about bringing the two machines into parity in terms of
portage
config files. Other than LibreOffice I'm pretty sure our world files are
close
and Office is binary anyway.

She actually uses very few apps. The big sticking point here is the
time it takes to build KDE which I'm going to do anyway on my machine so
if the binary packages work that would be great.

As I'm travelling next week there's no rush on this. I'll do some reading
and think about possibly giving it a try.

Cheers,
Mark
Re: Re: How much value does llvm provide for a low-use laptop? [ In reply to ]
On Mon, Apr 17, 2017 at 1:31 PM, Allan Wegan <allanwegan@allanwegan.de> wrote:
>> Please turn off the HTML posts.
>
> His post is a multipart message containing an additional plaintext
> version. If you saw the HTML version, your client is broken or
> misconfigured.
>
>
>
> --
> Allan Wegan
> <http://www.allanwegan.de/>
> Jabber: allanwegan@ffnord.net
> OTR-Fingerprint: E4DCAA40 4859428E B3912896 F2498604 8CAA126F
> Jabber: allanwegan@jabber.ccc.de
> OTR-Fingerprint: A1AAA1B9 C067F988 4A424D33 98343469 29164587
> ICQ: 209459114
> OTR-Fingerprint: 71DE5B5E 67D6D758 A93BF1CE 7DA06625 205AC6EC
>

Allan,
I think I found the GMail setting to ensure completely plain
text responses. Please respond if that doesn't appear to be
the case.

While I felt Duncan's response to this issue was a bit heavy handed
there may have been some change in the way GMail was sending
emails as I started getting bounces from Linux Lists that won't even
accept an HTML subpart. I never had those before so hopefully
this addresses both that and Duncan's issue.

Cheers,
Mark
Re: Re: How much value does llvm provide for a low-use laptop? [ In reply to ]
Mark Knecht wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 17, 2017 at 1:31 PM, Allan Wegan <allanwegan@allanwegan.de> wrote:
>>> Please turn off the HTML posts.
>> His post is a multipart message containing an additional plaintext
>> version. If you saw the HTML version, your client is broken or
>> misconfigured.
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Allan Wegan
>> <http://www.allanwegan.de/>
>> Jabber: allanwegan@ffnord.net
>> OTR-Fingerprint: E4DCAA40 4859428E B3912896 F2498604 8CAA126F
>> Jabber: allanwegan@jabber.ccc.de
>> OTR-Fingerprint: A1AAA1B9 C067F988 4A424D33 98343469 29164587
>> ICQ: 209459114
>> OTR-Fingerprint: 71DE5B5E 67D6D758 A93BF1CE 7DA06625 205AC6EC
>>
> Allan,
> I think I found the GMail setting to ensure completely plain
> text responses. Please respond if that doesn't appear to be
> the case.
>
> While I felt Duncan's response to this issue was a bit heavy handed
> there may have been some change in the way GMail was sending
> emails as I started getting bounces from Linux Lists that won't even
> accept an HTML subpart. I never had those before so hopefully
> this addresses both that and Duncan's issue.
>
> Cheers,
> Mark
>
>

If I'm reading this correctly, I'm no expert on this, it shows this here:

"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8"

If I'm looking at the right thing, it should be text only.

I wonder what mine looks like???

Dale

:-) :-)
Re: Re: How much value does llvm provide for a low-use laptop? [ In reply to ]
On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 4:58 PM, Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
> Mark Knecht wrote:
>> On Mon, Apr 17, 2017 at 1:31 PM, Allan Wegan <allanwegan@allanwegan.de> wrote:
>>>> Please turn off the HTML posts.
>>> His post is a multipart message containing an additional plaintext
>>> version. If you saw the HTML version, your client is broken or
>>> misconfigured.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Allan Wegan
>>> <http://www.allanwegan.de/>
>>> Jabber: allanwegan@ffnord.net
>>> OTR-Fingerprint: E4DCAA40 4859428E B3912896 F2498604 8CAA126F
>>> Jabber: allanwegan@jabber.ccc.de
>>> OTR-Fingerprint: A1AAA1B9 C067F988 4A424D33 98343469 29164587
>>> ICQ: 209459114
>>> OTR-Fingerprint: 71DE5B5E 67D6D758 A93BF1CE 7DA06625 205AC6EC
>>>
>> Allan,
>> I think I found the GMail setting to ensure completely plain
>> text responses. Please respond if that doesn't appear to be
>> the case.
>>
>> While I felt Duncan's response to this issue was a bit heavy handed
>> there may have been some change in the way GMail was sending
>> emails as I started getting bounces from Linux Lists that won't even
>> accept an HTML subpart. I never had those before so hopefully
>> this addresses both that and Duncan's issue.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Mark
>>
>>
>
> If I'm reading this correctly, I'm no expert on this, it shows this here:
>
> "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8"
>
> If I'm looking at the right thing, it should be text only.
>
> I wonder what mine looks like???
>
> Dale
>
> :-) :-)
>
>

Hi Dale,
Well, at least your response to my already text version appears
to be text also.

I think this comes down to somehow my GMail account got a bit
flipped somehow. I've never used the area that fixed it so who knows?

Anyway, I think it's fixed unless someone points out an issue.

Cheers,
Mark
Re: How much value does llvm provide for a low-use laptop? [ In reply to ]
Mark Knecht posted on Tue, 02 May 2017 14:30:02 -0700 as excerpted:

> I think I found the GMail setting to ensure completely plain
> text responses. Please respond if that doesn't appear to be the case.

This one is indeed plain text. Thanks. =:^)

Tho one caution you should be aware of. Some mail clients default to (or
have a setting for) text-only if replying to text-only, but behave quite
differently (by default and/or as a separate setting), posting in html,
if doing an original post (not reply) or replying to posts with an HTML
part.

Since your reply here was to a plain-text post, you can't yet be entirely
sure what the behavior when posting a non-reply original message will be.

Just in case you see that later and get confused as you thought you had
it sorted. You wouldn't be the first and I'm sure not the last either.

--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
Re: Re: How much value does llvm provide for a low-use laptop? [ In reply to ]
Dale skrev den 2017-05-03 01:58:

> I wonder what mine looks like???

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:51.0) Gecko/20100101
Firefox/51.0 SeaMonkey/2.48
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

perfect
Re: Re: How much value does llvm provide for a low-use laptop? [ In reply to ]
Mark Knecht skrev den 2017-05-03 02:10:

> Anyway, I think it's fixed unless someone points out an issue.

some mua can reply in same format as the original sender do, so if the
sender sends html posts replyes would in some cases be in html format
aswell, not always desired on maillists

most mua can in addressbooks have what format is desired to each
recipient, so knowing this will make it more flowless, not just disable
html postings entirely :=)