Reticularium - Linux Comments

Comment on 'Gentoo Coreutils/touch problem hack' by Igor

2011-04-04T19:29:01+02:00

Technically the problem is the utimensat interface presented in 2.6.22 or about that time. And there is the correspondent function in glibc. If you can see man utimensat, you have it :) But if you have kernel older than 2.6.22, it’s not supported by your kernel.

So basically there are 2 problems. One is that despite glibc is able to rollback to the older call named enosys, coreutils package compiled against this glibc is unable to rollback. Its source just assumes that if this function is available, it is usable. It makes sense, kinda just upgrade your kernel and you’ll be fine. But here another problem appears: those Xen providers with 2.6.18 kernels. There’s plenty of them, including Amazon.

Well, actually there are other problems, too. Udev related and so on. I am working on getting 2.6.34 xen-sources based Gentoo booted on EC2, via PVGrub. My old Gentoo 2.6.18-based images become unbootable if I run emerge –sync / emerge world, so things are getting really bad.

BTW, binary distros are going to run into the same problem soon as well. So eventually Xen providers will have to upgrade their official kernels. I personally have my servers on Slicehost and Rackspace, they both have good Gentoo images and new kernels. But I have quite a few clients using AWS..

Comment on 'Gentoo Coreutils/touch problem hack' by Flow

2011-04-04T18:15:45+02:00

Thanks a lot for your post. I always wondered why suddenly “touch” stopped working. Seems like there are a lot gentoo xen users with 2.6.18 out there.

Some more technical background would be interesting. :-)

Comment on 'Gentoo Coreutils/touch problem hack' by Igor

2011-03-01T20:44:31+01:00

Still the same.. Gentoo on Xen (which means old kernel) and voila - Failed ‘touch .unpacked’ But I love Gentoo anyways :)

Comment on 'Gentoo Coreutils/touch problem hack' by Trevor

2011-03-01T10:33:26+01:00

Thanks for that…..so whats going on with this ? Bloody gentoo!!!

Comment on 'Enabling Gnome composite extension' by shit

2010-06-18T21:52:46+02:00

OK, it was really interesting) i’ve burn rss