02-03-2020, 09:41 AM
(02-03-2020, 02:08 AM)phs Wrote:(02-01-2020, 01:53 AM)moonwalkers Wrote:(01-31-2020, 04:06 PM)Solra Bizna Wrote: I've had a Core 2 Duo with 3GiB of RAM as my daily driver for years. I originally used zram, and saw some benefits from it, but when I switched to zswap the benefit can only be described as magical.
My understanding is that the rule of thumb is "zswap if you can have a swap partition, zram if you can't". Slow writes like you'd have on eMMC/SD might tip the balance in zram's favor, though; every machine I've used zswap on (including my PBP) has had a fast SSD to back it.
Would you mind sharing the specifics of how you tuned zswap? As well as your typical/max VM usage. Maybe you just figured out the right combination of tunables I couldn't, or maybe my SSD was no longer as fast as it used to be. But I was frequently cramming 5GiB of data in RAM on my TP T60p with zram, where zswap wasn't perceptibly much better than just plain swap.
(01-31-2020, 10:10 PM)jasrn Wrote: I'm not sure if anyone else is running into it but I'm having trouble getting Gnome to start up after installing onto the eMMC using the installer. Right now I've got an SD card with the main Mate image on it, and am booting from that, installing the install script and trying to install a Gnome environment onto the internal MMC. I simply clone the repo, run `install_debian` with the DEVBLK set to mmcblk1 (the internal SD card) and run through the setup wizard (selecting "Debian Desktop, Gnome and Laptop" from the tasks list, and a 105 intl key keyboard from the keyboard prompt). Everything seems fine until I reboot - I see the Debian splash screen, followed by a blinking cursor then eventually a grey screen containing "Oh no, something has gone wrong".
If I press Ctrl + Alt + F2 I'm dropped into a terminal session where I can log in, and confirm the base system seems fine. dmesg doesn't give me any interesting output beyond thew already reported missing firmware issue.
Has anyone else seen this? I'm somewhat at a loss!
In my installation I was using KDE and sddm kept crashing until I: a) added QT_XCB_FORCE_SOFTWARE_OPENGL=1 in /etc/environment, b) built mesa-git and made sure /usr/local/lib is given priority, c) installed mesa from experimental. Same was for some GTK stuff. Try forcing software rendering with the like of LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 perhaps? If that works you may need newer mesa. Otherwise I have no advise other then digging into logs.
I am experiencing something similar. While experimenting with video acceleration my PBP freezed up, and subsequently would not boot into the bootstrapped debian image. Instead I saw a graphical crash loop similar to my first experience with the cheap 8 GB U1 microSD: a blank screen, a brief appearance of a mouse cursor, then a blinking cursor in the upper left before repeating. I never got the "Oh no" screen, but then I also did not install gnome. Thinking I had fried the microSD somehow, I just today got my hands on a 32 GB A1.
It exhibits the same behavior. I was able to get into another getty and in my dmesg I see one occurrence of this line for each crash loop (I can see new ones appear if I let the loop continue):
broken atomic modeset userspace detected, disabling atomic
..which seems to be this patch, somehow related to issues starting the graphical environment with the GPU [0]. I have no reason to think I would not have seen this message the first time I hit this failure mode, if I was able to get into a terminal.
Adding the mentioned environment variables to /etc/environment (and rebooting, confirming they appear in e.g. env in a getty session) has no effect.
[0]: https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/11133803/
This sounds identical to my behavior! I can also SSH in and checking the system logs and I see Xorg or Wayland (depending on which I have selected in gdm.conf) segfault. The funny thing is I had debian working a week ago but since this I can't get it work regardless of how I flash it or which SD card I write it to (or eMMC). It's almost as if some HW flag is set that isn't compatible with the way this image is working now that I don't know how to unflag it (And not sure why it'd persist across reboot as that seems odd)