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A Linux Evening

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Re: A Linux Evening

#61

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

nneonneo wrote: post #54
l1k wrote: post #15

Thunderbolt devices appear in the OS as a PCIe switch, so you need two additional bus numbers (one for the Switch Upstream Port and one for the Switch Downstream Port). If the device is hotplugged to a port which has run out of bus numbers, you'll get this error message. Mika Westerberg is constantly fine-tuning the allocation of PCI resources in the Linux kernel to avoid such scenarios. Some recent patches: https://…

It sounds like the pause/unpause might be the way to fix this properly, since trying to be heuristically smarter sounds like a recipe for never-ending corner case bugs like the OP’s issue. The patch for pausing and unpausing seems quite reasonable, except that it does require driver support (unsurprising - you’re literally reallocating the resources used by the driver!). I suppose if you had at least a few movable de…

What is the point in having all of the drivers be open sourced and mainlined if we're not willing to fix them to support this?

Re: A Linux Evening

#62

Post by blueflow »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #61
nneonneo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like the pause/unpause might be the way to fix this properly, since trying to be heuristically smarter sounds like a recipe for never-ending corner case bugs like the OP’s issue. The patch for pausing and unpausing seems quite reasonable, except that it does require driver support (unsurprising - you’re literally reallocating the resources used by the driver!). I suppose if you had at least a few movable de…

What is the point in having all of the drivers be open sourced and mainlined if we're not willing to fix them to support this?

No post body was provided.

Re: A Linux Evening

#63

Post by [deleted] »

nicoco wrote: post #33

> I spent several hours fixing a problem and I learned next to nothing in the process. This is probably true for this specific case here, but my experience with fixing stuff in Linux is actually the opposite. I learnt a lot doing so, and learnt stuff that turned out to be later useful in very unexpected spots. Back when I was a teen and using Windows, I've spent countless hours fiddling in stuff in regedit and other…

[deleted]

Re: A Linux Evening

#64

Post by bryanlarsen »

This is prototypical of the standard Linux experience, but I'd like to remark on just how much less common this sort of thing is. Modern Linux and modern Linux distributions have a much larger "just work" factor and it's getting better every year in my experience. Slowly and asymptotically, but it is improvement.

This was driven home recently by my experience switching to NixOS. NixOS is brilliant in many ways, but boy are there papercuts everywhere. It's all soluble but it is annoying. 25 years ago this sort of fiddling was fun, but now it's just tedious.

Re: A Linux Evening

#65

Post by pedrocr »

I've been trying for a week now to get Windows to properly suspend and stay suspended on a Thinkpad X1. Even after changing the BIOS to "Linux" mode (S3 Sleep), fiddling with drivers and the registry, and issuing powercfg commands it's still flaky. The function keys to change audio settings also work poorly sometimes. These are the kinds of issues we used to have when trying to bring up Linux on a laptop. But now it's flipped. Linux on Thinkpads works great for me out of the box and I even get to set it up just like I want it (e.g., tiling WM).

For my own use I'd have just given up and installed Linux on this machine as well but I have to dogfood this for everyone else in the company. I'm starting to try out using web versions of everything, particularly Microsoft Office, in the hope that ChromeOS is actually a hope for a usable desktop for unsophisticated corporate users.

Re: A Linux Evening

#66

Post by leidenfrost »

dark-star wrote: post #18

I had a similar experience recently. Updated my Manjaro setup, rebooted, and was greeted with text mode. X just didn't load. 1 hour of reading logfiles and pondering about why the kernel module wouldn't load, it turns out I needed to add an obscure boot parameter (I think it was something like "ibp=off") to my kernel command line to make the nvidia module load again. Easy solution if you know how to solve it, 1 hour…

I had a similar experience with a workplace machine. It worked flawlessly. But, sometimes, I went to make myself coffee or to the bathroom, and when I was back, the system just never woke up from sleep.

I try setting the machine to sleep and manually waking it up. No problem.

Later, I spent some time watching a long youtube video, then I opened the terminal and then the OS crashed.

Dmesg? It showed nothing

But, sometimes, when I tried to launch the terminal, I tried running htop and then the OS hanged. I had the feeling that it was something HD related.

I restarted the machine, updated the kernel, asked the forums, everything. No answer.

It was my work machine. They let me install Linux but I couldn't spend so much time with the OS. I need to have work done. Otherwise I need to bail and go back to Windows (ugh).

I was about to delete Linux from the laptop, but I had an idea: The machine was a Thinkpad T1. I looked on the Arch Wiki about compatibility with that laptop. If the problem came from an incompatibility with the hardware, it will surely show up there. The machine showed up in a list and according to the wiki, there's nothing related to a crash or a freeze.

Then, I looked up on lshw if there was any piece of hardware that was different of what the Thinkpad has by defaults.

The result? A Kingston 1TB SSD. I googled "Linux Kingston ssd lock up", "Linux Kingston ssd crash".

It turns out, some Kingston SSDs don't support all the deep sleep levels of energy saving. I needed to switch some off with a kernel parameter.

I never had any problems with that machine again.

Re: A Linux Evening

#67

Post by seanwilson »

> I spent several hours fixing a problem and I learned next to nothing in the process. This trick is unlikely to be useful again. By the time I encounter something similar, it is likely I will have forgotten about the solution.

So much of modern programming in general is like this because of the always changing languages, libraries, tools, software, hardware etc. such that when you're coding you have to accept it will keep happening occasionally no matter how experienced you get so you don't get too wound up about it. It's especially discouraging when you're starting out too and don't know this yet.

Re: A Linux Evening

#68

Post by markus_zhang »

nicoco wrote: post #33

> I spent several hours fixing a problem and I learned next to nothing in the process. This is probably true for this specific case here, but my experience with fixing stuff in Linux is actually the opposite. I learnt a lot doing so, and learnt stuff that turned out to be later useful in very unexpected spots. Back when I was a teen and using Windows, I've spent countless hours fiddling in stuff in regedit and other…

I think unless one uses Linux on daily basis it's really difficult to sink in the knowledge. I decided to install an Archlinux VM and see what happens.

I'm kinda disappointed to myself as I found out I didn't like too much trouble so I'll probably never be a good/great programmer.

Re: A Linux Evening

#69

Post by tomrod »

_8j50 wrote: post #16

I said linux was fragile the other day and someone replied "in what way", this post is a good answer. In the past also I had similar critiques to my own criticism of Linux. Who knows how many total days and weeks I spent on random things like this and all the obstacles I had to overcome. Just to get secure boot working on debian, I had to overcome their block of my vpn IP on their wiki, and the sign-tool which is imp…

Windows and Mac have their fragile points as well.

For starters, Windows is Ubuntu bug #1. (I kid).

The nice thing about Linux is it can evolve without being pulled into advertising-and-data-monetization as a business plan. In other words, society is better off with it.

Re: A Linux Evening

#70

Post by Ruq »

My last (Arch btw) Linux Evening was my laptop suddenly not booting after an update. I thought it must've been me, so I booted into the install media and reinstalled and reconfigured grub in a way that I knew would fix it...except it didn't.

I then learned that GRUB had a bug introduced in an update that completely borked it for my system. So rather than deal with it I finally used it as the excuse I needed to ditch GRUB for systemd-boot, which if anything is actually simpler.

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