OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Part 4

So a MASSIVE update was waiting for me today.

Unfortunately the massive update included a new kernel and that new kernel broke my UI because I use an NVidia driver.  I ended up allowing the update but booted into the old kernel which was still there, then I applied a zypper lock to it so it would not go away in the future.

The old kernel works perfectly fine.  The whole "Oh it's NVidia's fault - they suck!" argument is becoming quite tiresome since the NVidia drivers worked fine until a new kernel was introduced by OpenSUSE.  So... whatever.  NVidia released their sources too if I am not mistaken, over a year ago now.  How is that progressing, kernel devs?  Wayland devs?  Bueller?  Anyone?

So, be prepared if you have an NVidia card, OpenSUSE will most likely break it.

Zen kernel on Fedora 31 part 3

Tonight I booted back into normal kernel and immediately noticed the "lack of snappiness".  I wish I had a way of measuring this... because to the human eye it is actually very obvious that the Zen kernel I built and use is much more responsive (or at least gives you the impression it is) than the standard kernel.

It is probably because the standard kernel is geared toward more generic use, which could include server use... while the zen kernel is geared toward a desktop/single-user system.

Whatever the case may be, the difference is very obvious.

On a less favorable note, I don't know what happens whenever I update Fedora, but it seems to corrupt my grub boot process.  It happened today and I was certain I would have to rebuild, but I booted into Pop!_OS off of my thumb drive and it seemed to fix the problem, somehow.  When I then rebooted, grub did not fail and I was able to select my custom kernel and boot.  It is very strange.

Zen kernel on Fedora 31 part 2

Since building my zen/muqss kernel and running on my Fedora 31 build I have noticed a couple of interesting things.

1. Memory usage seems to be lower in general, however it no longer caches as much in RAM.

2. CPU usage seems a little higher in general and most noticeable is the NVidia queue thread.  I had read that some people were seeing that, especially with composition pipeline enabled (I have comp-pipe enabled but not full force comp-pipe).  I do not remember seeing this at all prior to building the zen kernel.  So I find it interesting.  Supposedly if I uncheck the comp pipeline switches it will come down.  Not worried about it though.  Kworker threads seem a little more active as well.

It does seem a little snappier.  But since I did not run any kind of tests before hand that is heresay.

Anyway, I will write more if I have time....

Zen Kernel on Fedora 31

OK, I know this is geeky and ridiculous but... I DID IT!  :D   :D   :D

I downloaded the zen kernel sources, snagged the fedora config, and based on some instructions from 2011 was able to build my own ZEN KERNEL!

Sorry, I am just pumped by this.  I honestly didn't expect it to build, then I didn't expect it to work and, at first, it did not because it did not automatically generate an initrd image.  Read how to do that, built my own and BOOM.  Here it is.  I am pretty sure I overbuilt it and it is large, takes longer to load.  But it DOES and it is even working with my Nvidia driver.

Seriously...  this is the best thing I have done in weeks.  Gives me a little bit of  geek pride when I thought all my geekiness had fled me.

Anyway, thanks for reading! 

Pop!_os Kernel update

Told you about my upgrade of the kernel recently, well that kernel had a number of issues regarding video / system freezes.  A new kernel came out not long after and had a number of changes but none of them screamed "fix for video freezes" to me...

Even so, I have not had (knocks on wood) a freeze since then.  No idea why.  Makes little sense to me.  But for reference:

Linux 4.19.6-041906-generic #201812010432 SMP Sat Dec 1 09:34:07 UTC 2018

I *did* have one strange thing happen, while doing several things which included backing up files, downloading files and installing software my system started slowing down drastically.

Network showed fine, I could view directories in my file viewer fine...  so I rebooted and when it came up I had systemd logging errors flashing across... so I rebooted AGAIN and since then everything has been fine.  No files lost, as far as I can tell.  It was just strange.

ANYWHO... for the most part the system has been running very well.

Continuing with Pop!_os

So the other day I wanted to try the latest release of Manjaro Gnome (18.0) so I did a backup of my home directory/sub-directories and installed Manjaro.

I am familiar with Manjaro albeit the XFCE version.  It was my OS prior to going to Pop!  It installed easily and I fired it right up and began configuring the things I use most frequently.  But honestly?  While there are some aspects of the implementation of Gnome I missed, it didn't really offer any better performance or features compared to Pop!  So today I wiped it and reverted to Pop!_os, restored my backups (or at least part of them, game saves mostly since I already store my major folders on other disks) and then went a little overboard.

Well, not REALLY overboard but, I decided I wanted to try and update the kernel.  This felt risky since I believe System76 does some kernel tweaking, but I figured why not?  So I installed uvuu, selected the latest linux kernel and clicked install (and also had the grub configuration rewritten).  When it completed (without error) it told me to reboot.  I did, and well... in all honesty I thought it would fail miserably and I would have to reinstall Pop!_os but... it worked!  I am now running (per uname -rsv) Linux 4.19.5-041905-generic #201811271131 SMP Tue Nov 27 16:33:46 UTC 2018.

It has the module[s] for Nvidia drivers, my network seems to be fine, and I could almost swear memory usage is down on average, at least from what I remember from HTOP over the previous weeks.  But without recorded data that is hearsay.

I will have to play around with it for a week to see how it really does.  But so far so good.