Troubles with install image

Troubles with install image

[David Thompson]

Tonight I was almost able to get guix installed on a Thinkpad X60S.  The
USB image booted and my OS configuration was valid, but the installation
failed.  Due to hydra.gnu.org being unresponsive, Guix tried to compile
Guix 0.6 and ran out of memory while doing so (no swap space).

Since hydra seems to always be under a lot of stress, I wonder if I
should set up another machine of mine to serve substitutes or even just
offload builds so that my installation can complete.  Is this relatively
easy to set up?

-- 
David Thompson
Web Developer - Free Software Foundation - http://fsf.org
GPG Key: 0FF1D807
Support the FSF: https://fsf.org/donate

Re: Troubles with install image

[Sree Harsha Totakura]

On 07/15/2014 03:54 AM, David Thompson wrote:
> Since hydra seems to always be under a lot of stress, I wonder if I
> should set up another machine of mine to serve substitutes or even just
> offload builds so that my installation can complete.  Is this relatively
> easy to set up?

I once tried it on a Debian and it was not easy.  Ludo advised to set it up
using Nix and from what I later found, it is easy to do it on Nix.

Sree

Re: Troubles with install image

[Thompson, David]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 3:27 AM, Sree Harsha Totakura
<sreeharsha@totakura.in> wrote:
> On 07/15/2014 03:54 AM, David Thompson wrote:
>> Since hydra seems to always be under a lot of stress, I wonder if I
>> should set up another machine of mine to serve substitutes or even just
>> offload builds so that my installation can complete.  Is this relatively
>> easy to set up?
>
> I once tried it on a Debian and it was not easy.  Ludo advised to set it up
> using Nix and from what I later found, it is easy to do it on Nix.

Are you referring to offloading builds or using a replacement to
hydra.gnu.org for serving substitutes?

Offloading builds seems like a good enough solution for now, but I'm
not sure if there is support for offloading i686 builds to an x86_64
machine.

I want to have this up and running before the release.  I'm so close,
just need to get over this last (fingers crossed) hurdle.

Re: Troubles with install image

[Ludovic Courtès]

David Thompson <dthompson2@worcester.edu> skribis:

> Tonight I was almost able to get guix installed on a Thinkpad X60S.  The
> USB image booted and my OS configuration was valid, but the installation
> failed.  Due to hydra.gnu.org being unresponsive, Guix tried to compile
> Guix 0.6 and ran out of memory while doing so (no swap space).

Argh.  :-/

How much RAM does the laptop have?  It’s problematic if we end up
swapping when building Guix on modern hardware.  My laptop has 4 GiB of
RAM and fortunately it never swaps.

(But note that the message saying it’s “unresponsive” usually means that
at least it’s not dead, just slow...)

> Since hydra seems to always be under a lot of stress, I wonder if I
> should set up another machine of mine to serve substitutes or even just
> offload builds so that my installation can complete.  Is this relatively
> easy to set up?

You could first retry right now as hydra.gnu.org seems to be reasonably
responsive.  ;-)

To set up offloading, you must first have ‘lsh’ installed in the image,
which is not the case by default.  All this is doable, but that’s
tedious.


Thanks,
Ludo’.

Re: Troubles with install image

[Sree Harsha Totakura]

On 07/15/2014 05:34 PM, Thompson, David wrote:
> Are you referring to offloading builds or using a replacement to
> hydra.gnu.org for serving substitutes?

I was talking about an addition (local cache) to hydra.gnu.org.

Sree

Re: Troubles with install image

[David Thompson]

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> How much RAM does the laptop have?  It’s problematic if we end up
> swapping when building Guix on modern hardware.  My laptop has 4 GiB of
> RAM and fortunately it never swaps.

1GB.  I added another 512MB and the build was almost successful.  The
nar.scm test file fails.  It's the only test failure. :(

> (But note that the message saying it’s “unresponsive” usually means that
> at least it’s not dead, just slow...)

Okay.  It's strange then, whatever version of guix the install image
wants must not be on hydra.

-- 
David Thompson
Web Developer - Free Software Foundation - http://fsf.org
GPG Key: 0FF1D807
Support the FSF: https://fsf.org/donate

Re: Troubles with install image

[Ludovic Courtès]

Sree Harsha Totakura <sreeharsha@totakura.in> skribis:

> On 07/15/2014 05:34 PM, Thompson, David wrote:
>> Are you referring to offloading builds or using a replacement to
>> hydra.gnu.org for serving substitutes?
>
> I was talking about an addition (local cache) to hydra.gnu.org.

You mean another Hydra instance, no?

Ludo’.

Re: Troubles with install image

[Ludovic Courtès]

David Thompson <dthompson2@worcester.edu> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> How much RAM does the laptop have?  It’s problematic if we end up
>> swapping when building Guix on modern hardware.  My laptop has 4 GiB of
>> RAM and fortunately it never swaps.
>
> 1GB.  I added another 512MB and the build was almost successful.  The
> nar.scm test file fails.  It's the only test failure. :(

Blech, we’ll have to check the test logs.

It would also be good sometime to investigate why it’s eating up so much
RAM.

>> (But note that the message saying it’s “unresponsive” usually means that
>> at least it’s not dead, just slow...)
>
> Okay.  It's strange then, whatever version of guix the install image
> wants must not be on hydra.

Hmm, weird.  Would be great if you could check the directory name of
that Guix.

Thanks,
Ludo’.

Re: Troubles with install image

[Sree Harsha Totakura]

On 07/16/2014 11:17 AM, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> You mean another Hydra instance, no?
Yes.

Sree

Re: Troubles with install image

[David Thompson]

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> Blech, we’ll have to check the test logs.

I noticed that the i686 build for Guix 0.6 is failing on hydra, so it's
failing here for similar reasons.

> Hmm, weird.  Would be great if you could check the directory name of
> that Guix.

54pwrdggi9wxz2kx56fkmpffkkyzzjc3-guix-0.6

From reading gnu/system/install.scm file, I would expect it to install
the guix dev package, not the 0.6 release.  I'm quite confused.

-- 
David Thompson
Web Developer - Free Software Foundation - http://fsf.org
GPG Key: 0FF1D807
Support the FSF: https://fsf.org/donate

Re: Troubles with install image

[David Thompson]

David Thompson <dthompson2@worcester.edu> writes:

> From reading gnu/system/install.scm file, I would expect it to install
> the guix dev package, not the 0.6 release.  I'm quite confused.

Okay, so as a hack I edited the package definition for guix 0.6 so that
it would skip the test suite.  I was able to complete the installation
this way.

Unfortunately, when I booted I was greeted by a kernel panic:

In /gnu/store/1xi72srwwr0q28gyxb4zq5gz408zpd-module-import/guix/build/linux-initrd.scm:
 630: 2 [boot-system # # # ...]
 371: 1 [configure-qemu-networking "eth0"]
In unknown file:
   ?: 0 [network-interface-flags #<input-output: socket 5> "eth0"]
   
ERROR: In procedure network-interface-flags: No such device

So close, yet so far.

-- 
David Thompson
Web Developer - Free Software Foundation - http://fsf.org
GPG Key: 0FF1D807
Support the FSF: https://fsf.org/donate

Re: Troubles with install image

[Ludovic Courtès]

David Thompson <dthompson2@worcester.edu> skribis:

> David Thompson <dthompson2@worcester.edu> writes:
>
>> From reading gnu/system/install.scm file, I would expect it to install
>> the guix dev package, not the 0.6 release.  I'm quite confused.
>
> Okay, so as a hack I edited the package definition for guix 0.6 so that
> it would skip the test suite.  I was able to complete the installation
> this way.
>
> Unfortunately, when I booted I was greeted by a kernel panic:
>
> In /gnu/store/1xi72srwwr0q28gyxb4zq5gz408zpd-module-import/guix/build/linux-initrd.scm:
>  630: 2 [boot-system # # # ...]
>  371: 1 [configure-qemu-networking "eth0"]
> In unknown file:
>    ?: 0 [network-interface-flags #<input-output: socket 5> "eth0"]
>    
> ERROR: In procedure network-interface-flags: No such device

In 0.6, the default initrd would try to setup QEMU networking by
default, which is bound to fail here.

I’ll investigate why it’s installing 0.6, why Guix fails to build on
i686, and report back.

Thanks for your perseverance!

Ludo’.

Re: Troubles with install image

[Ludovic Courtès]

David Thompson <dthompson2@worcester.edu> skribis:

> I noticed that the i686 build for Guix 0.6 is failing on hydra, so it's
> failing here for similar reasons.

Actually 0.6 fails, but not the development version:

  http://hydra.gnu.org/eval/93654?filter=guix&compare=93605&full=#tabs-still-succeed

Ludo’.

Re: Troubles with install image

[Thompson, David]

On Thu, Jul 17, 2014 at 11:05 AM, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
> David Thompson <dthompson2@worcester.edu> skribis:
>
>> I noticed that the i686 build for Guix 0.6 is failing on hydra, so it's
>> failing here for similar reasons.
>
> Actually 0.6 fails, but not the development version:

Yes, I noticed that, too.  Thanks for helping with this!

- Dave

Re: Troubles with install image

[Ludovic Courtès]

David Thompson <dthompson2@worcester.edu> skribis:

> From reading gnu/system/install.scm file, I would expect it to install
> the guix dev package, not the 0.6 release.  I'm quite confused.

OK, here’s the story:

The installation image does include the development version, as you
noticed.

When you run ‘guix system init’ from the USB stick, that’s the
development version that’s used, specifically commit 20b1d19.

However, (@ (gnu packages package-management) guix) in commit 20b1d19
referred to Guix 0.6.

Thus, you end up installing Guix 0.6.

Commit 42b9b8f solves that by upgrading the development snapshot (I only
tested it on x86_64 though.)

Ludo’.

Re: Troubles with install image

[David Thompson]

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> The installation image does include the development version, as you
> noticed.
>
> When you run ‘guix system init’ from the USB stick, that’s the
> development version that’s used, specifically commit 20b1d19.
>
> However, (@ (gnu packages package-management) guix) in commit 20b1d19
> referred to Guix 0.6.
>
> Thus, you end up installing Guix 0.6.
>
> Commit 42b9b8f solves that by upgrading the development snapshot (I only
> tested it on x86_64 though.)

Getting a lot closer.  I am now able to complete the system installation
without having to compile a single package.  However, when I boot I'm
thrown in a guile debugger.

  ext2fs_check_if_mount: Can't check if filesystem is mounted due to
  missing mtab file when determining whether /dev/sdb1 is mounted.
  fsck.ext4: No such device or address while trying to open /dev/sdb1
  Possibily non-existent or swap device?
  'fsck.ext4' exited with code 8 on /dev/sdb1

I'm not sure if this problem has to do with some of the oddities of this
particular machine.  It runs coreboot, and the grub menu that I get
initially isn't the grub.cfg that guix installs.  So, I drop to the grub
console and `set root=(ahci0,msdos1)` and `configfile
/boot/grub/grub.cfg` to get to the menu.

I also ran `(file-exists? "/dev/sdb1")` at the debugger prompt and the
return value was #t.

Any ideas?

-- 
David Thompson
Web Developer - Free Software Foundation - http://fsf.org
GPG Key: 0FF1D807
Support the FSF: https://fsf.org/donate

Re: Troubles with install image

[Jason Self]

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David Thompson asked:
> Any ideas?

I have one of these machines too. You're using the fork of coreboot
called libreboot right? The grub.cfg that you see is in from the flash
chip. Try using the "Scan" option at the bottom to have it scan the
HDD and use that grub.cfg instead.

Once the Scan option is completed you'll see a new menu item at the
bottom that wasn't there before, representing the grub.cfg from the
HDD. Select it and press return.

I have to boot my machine this way all the time. I've been too lazy to
replace the grug.cfg in the flash chip with the proper one I need. The
exact process is documented on libreboot.org if you care to do that.

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Re: Troubles with install image

[Ludovic Courtès]

David Thompson <dthompson2@worcester.edu> skribis:

>   ext2fs_check_if_mount: Can't check if filesystem is mounted due to
>   missing mtab file when determining whether /dev/sdb1 is mounted.
>   fsck.ext4: No such device or address while trying to open /dev/sdb1
>   Possibily non-existent or swap device?
>   'fsck.ext4' exited with code 8 on /dev/sdb1

It could be that (1) it’s not called that way, or (2) additional kernel
modules need to be loaded so that the device is visible.

For (1), you could try using a partition label rather than the actual
device name in the ‘file-system’ declaration.

For (2), you could check in the kernel log whether sdb is detected.

Ludo’.

Re: Troubles with install image

[David Thompson]

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> David Thompson <dthompson2@worcester.edu> skribis:
>
>>   ext2fs_check_if_mount: Can't check if filesystem is mounted due to
>>   missing mtab file when determining whether /dev/sdb1 is mounted.
>>   fsck.ext4: No such device or address while trying to open /dev/sdb1
>>   Possibily non-existent or swap device?
>>   'fsck.ext4' exited with code 8 on /dev/sdb1
>
> It could be that (1) it’s not called that way, or (2) additional kernel
> modules need to be loaded so that the device is visible.
>
> For (1), you could try using a partition label rather than the actual
> device name in the ‘file-system’ declaration.
>
> For (2), you could check in the kernel log whether sdb is detected.

The problem was a little bit of 1 and 2.

When I am installing, the disk is known as sdb, but when I boot it's
known as sda.  So, I made that change in the file-system declaration.

The initrd doesn't have modules for ahci by default, so I took a little
snippet that Mark Weaver was using in his operating-system declaration:

  (initrd (cut base-initrd <> #:extra-modules '("libahci.ko" "ahci.ko")))

And now for the best news: I have a working installation of the GNU
system!  Thanks for all of your help!

-- 
David Thompson
Web Developer - Free Software Foundation - http://fsf.org
GPG Key: 0FF1D807
Support the FSF: https://fsf.org/donate

Re: Troubles with install image

[Alex Sassmannshausen]

Woot!

As I also have an x60 and I would be very interested in the installer
you used to get things this far if you are able to provide it somewhere?

If not, then I will simply use your achievement as motivation to build
one myself :-)

Best wishes,

Alex


David Thompson writes:

> Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> David Thompson <dthompson2@worcester.edu> skribis:
>>
>>>   ext2fs_check_if_mount: Can't check if filesystem is mounted due to
>>>   missing mtab file when determining whether /dev/sdb1 is mounted.
>>>   fsck.ext4: No such device or address while trying to open /dev/sdb1
>>>   Possibily non-existent or swap device?
>>>   'fsck.ext4' exited with code 8 on /dev/sdb1
>>
>> It could be that (1) it’s not called that way, or (2) additional kernel
>> modules need to be loaded so that the device is visible.
>>
>> For (1), you could try using a partition label rather than the actual
>> device name in the ‘file-system’ declaration.
>>
>> For (2), you could check in the kernel log whether sdb is detected.
>
> The problem was a little bit of 1 and 2.
>
> When I am installing, the disk is known as sdb, but when I boot it's
> known as sda.  So, I made that change in the file-system declaration.
>
> The initrd doesn't have modules for ahci by default, so I took a little
> snippet that Mark Weaver was using in his operating-system declaration:
>
>   (initrd (cut base-initrd <> #:extra-modules '("libahci.ko" "ahci.ko")))
>
> And now for the best news: I have a working installation of the GNU
> system!  Thanks for all of your help!

-- 
Sent with my mu4e

Re: Troubles with install image

[David Thompson]

Alex Sassmannshausen <alex.sassmannshausen@gmail.com> writes:

> As I also have an x60 and I would be very interested in the installer
> you used to get things this far if you are able to provide it somewhere?

Sure, this is Ludovic's minimal config, tweaked a bit:

  (use-modules (srfi srfi-26)
               (gnu))
  
  (operating-system
    (host-name "guix")
    (timezone "America/New_York")
    (locale "en_US.UTF-8")
    (initrd (cut base-initrd <> #:extra-modules '("libahci.ko" "ahci.ko")))
    ;; When installing from USB image, my hard disk is sdb, when booting
    ;; from the hard disk, it is sda.
    (bootloader (grub-configuration (device "/dev/sdb")))
    (file-systems (list (file-system
                          (device "/dev/sda1")
                          (mount-point "/")
                          (type "ext4")))))

-- 
David Thompson
Web Developer - Free Software Foundation - http://fsf.org
GPG Key: 0FF1D807
Support the FSF: https://fsf.org/donate

Re: Troubles with install image

[Ludovic Courtès]

David Thompson <dthompson2@worcester.edu> skribis:

> The initrd doesn't have modules for ahci by default, so I took a little
> snippet that Mark Weaver was using in his operating-system declaration:
>
>   (initrd (cut base-initrd <> #:extra-modules '("libahci.ko" "ahci.ko")))
>
> And now for the best news: I have a working installation of the GNU
> system!  Thanks for all of your help!

Excellent news, thank you for testing!

If it turns out to be a common requirement, we can add those modules to
the initrd by default.

Ludo’.