Category: Gentoo

Multiple times in the past I’ve been thinking of how Gentoo is perceived by the wider public, the non-users. What probably stands out most is compiling. Almost everyone who heard of Gentoo knows it has something to do with compiling everything. And why are we doing that? Well, besides being hardcore, the common sentiment goes for performance. So yeah, Gentoo users must be some kind of hardcore ricers who try to squeeze every last bit of their system performance.

To be honest, I don’t think that’s a good way to describe Gentoo. Yes, compiling is at the core of it. But performance? I don’t think so, at least not in the obvious, -O9999 -fzomg-fast way. The world has moved on, CPUs have gotten faster, optimizations have gotten smarter, and distributions have started optimizing more aggressively. Optimization-wise, I suspect your average Ubuntu package with generic optimizations may be no slower than the equivalent Gentoo package fine-tuned for your CPU. And if it’s not, then it probably won’t make a real difference anyway.

There’s much more to Gentoo than that. Yes, some of it comes from building from source: the flexibility. But a lot of it comes from the wider Gentoo philosophy, the philosophy that brought us all together. The idea that Gentoo is the distribution we’re making for ourselves and people who enjoy Gentoo. So if I were to make a few arguments for Gentoo, I’d focus on that. And this is what I’d like to do here.

Continue reading “Why Gentoo?”

A common problem with running Gentoo builds is concurrency. Many packages include extensive build steps that are either fully serial, or cannot fully utilize the available CPU threads throughout. This problem becomes less pronounced when running building multiple packages in parallel, but then we are risking overscheduling for packages that do take advantage of parallel builds.

Fortunately, there are a few tools at our disposal that can improve the situation. Most recently, they were joined by two experimental system-wide jobservers: guildmaster and steve. In this post, I’d like to provide the background on them, and discuss the problems they are facing.
Continue reading “One jobserver to rule them all”

“Gentoo CI” is the service providing periodic linting for the Gentoo repository. It is a part of the Repository mirror and CI project that I’ve started in 2015. Of course, it all started as a temporary third-party solution, but it persisted, was integrated into Gentoo Infrastructure and grew organically into quite a monstrosity.

It’s imperfect in many ways. In particular, it has only some degree of error recovery and when things go wrong beyond that, it requires a manual fix. Often the “fix” is to stop mirroring a problematic repository. Over time, I’ve started having serious doubts about the project, and proposed sunsetting most of it.

Lately, things have been getting worse. What started as a minor change in behavior of Git triggered a whole cascade of failures, leading to me finally announcing the deadline for sunsetting the mirroring of third-party repositories, and starting ripping non-critical bits out of it. Interesting enough, this whole process led me to finally discover the root cause of most of these failures — a bug that has existed since the very early version of the code, but happened to be hidden by the hacky error recovery code. Here’s the story of it.

Continue reading “How we incidentally uncovered a 7-year old bug in gentoo-ci”