EFI guide and 17.1 profile (plus keywords ~amd64)

[sarnold]

Hi, I'm following the EFI/Luks install (which I normally don't do) on a "new" (surplus) laptop and after unpacking the stage3 I have no default profile selected. I've been banging on the arm profiles and haven't done a fresh amd64 install for a while, and it shows both 17.0 and 17.1 profiles as stable (except musl/uclibc) but without a default.

So it looks like the profile gets reset later in the install, but it's not clear if it needs 17.0 or just "latest" default stable amd64 profile. Do you have any recommendations one way or the other?

[sakaki-]

Hi @sarnold,

so, you should use the 17.1 profile for the current stage 3s. 17.1 uses a different 64-bit/32-bit library split from 17.0, and is not backwards compatible.

I'm just in the process of revising the guide now actually - the reason the default profile appears 'missing' / unselected, is that the default paths used by Gentoo have changed (on the stage 3, but not yet reflected in the guide), as follows:
/usr/portage -> /var/db/repos/gentoo
/usr/portage/distfiles -> /var/cache/distfiles
/usr/portage/pacakges -> /var/cache/binpkgs

It is the first of these causing the trouble - the symlink /etc/portage/make.profile is pointing (on newer stage 3s) into ../../var/db/repos/gentoo/profiles/..., but the guide currently still calls for the tree to be installed into /usr/src/portage.

I'll have fixed and re-uploaded everything within a week or so, but to be clear the old locations will still work fine (since the relevant $PORTDIR, $DISTDIR and $PKGDIR directories are set in /etc/portage/make.conf), but you will explicitly need to set the profile to 17.1 (with eselect profile set ...).

Hope that makes sense! Best,

sakaki

[sarnold]

Thanks, I also have a few other things to report; mainly some dantrell-gnome issues and the gold linker kernel failure that keeps coming back (some recent discussion here: https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/7/15/181)

[sarnold]

Since the gold linker failure has an easy workaround, I made a separate issue for that (issue #16) but other items are more general (and mainly gnome or toolchain-specific). I'll see if I can list them more or less in order:

• librsvg and rust versions

This one is mainly due to the versions available in portage and the overlay; updating to the latest upstream is the real fix. The current librsvg packages only build with the oldest rust/rust-bin and fail with anything newer (and later firefox will require newer rust).

See dantrell/gentoo-overlay-dantrell-gnome#2

• USE=shotwell fails because vala MAX_VERSION is too low

Using 3-32 gnome branch and ~amd64 keywords installs vala 0.44 but shotwell sets MAX to 0.42 (simple fix is raise the max in the ebuild to 0.44).

I also added vala to the global use flags since it gets uses in a lot of gnome places...

• efi stub kernel won't boot by itself

This one I have no idea about; the current BIOS is the best suspect but I haven't looked for an update yet. It does boot fine using refind as the boot manager, so that's what I'm using now. The stub loader reads the kernel from USB and then just loops back to the bios. I'm not sure if the size is an issue, but the full kernel/initramfs image is pretty large (154M Oct 12 10:24 gentoo.efi).

Everything else worked up to and including secure boot with my own keys (using keytool.efi). I also tested kernel bootsplash (stolen from suse/manjaro) and it works fine, but doesn't have any hooks for the luks passphrase prompt so I switched back to plymouth. Lastly,

• full rebuild with lto/gold:
  • sys-devel/binutils: 2.32-r1::gentoo
  • sys-devel/gcc: 9.2.0-r1::gentoo

Except for a few exceptions this works pretty well now, and clang/lto really helps with things like nodejs/firefox. I ended up with only a handful of no-lto pkgs left:

# cat /etc/portage/package.env/lto-gold-fails
dev-libs/elfutils no-lto.conf
media-sound/pulseaudio no-lto.conf
dev-libs/libaio no-lto.conf
app-crypt/efitools no-lto.conf

media-libs/x264 no-gold.conf
media-libs/alsa-lib no-gold.conf
net-libs/webkit-gtk no-gold.conf

Note the above is not required, just worth reporting.

[sakaki-]

31 Oct 2020: sadly, due to legal obligations arising from a recent change in my 'real world' job, I must announce I am standing down as maintainer of this project with immediate effect. For the meantime, I will leave the repo up (for historical interest, and since the ebuilds etc. may be of use to others); however, I plan no further updates, nor will I be accepting / actioning further pull requests or bug reports from this point. Email requests for support will also have to be politely declined, so, please treat this as an effective EOL notice.

For further details, please see my post here.

If you have used my EFI Guide (and this repo) to install your PC-based Gentoo system, it should still continue to work for some time, but you should now take steps to migrate to a baseline Gentoo Handbook install (since the underlying tools, such as buildkernel, will also now no longer be supported and may eventually fail as more modern kernels etc. are released).

With sincere apologies, sakaki ><