zen-sources again on Gentoo

October 15, 2009 · Posted in Gentoo

Having been a crazy ‘zen-sources’ user, I really miss those kernel patches nowadays. So I took up the bug 288512 and zen-sources are again available for all Gentoo users[1]
I haven’t committed them yet on portage tree because I want to ensure that they are safe enough for everyday usage. So until then, you can get them via a new overlay hosted on github

git clone git://github.com/hwoarang/zen-sources.git

or via layman

layman -a zen-sources

Special thanks to Brandon Berhent for providing the initial Gentoo ebuilds, and for developing the zen-sources :)

Thanks Brandon :)

Have fun with your brand new kernel sources[2]

[1] http://github.com/hwoarang/zen-sources

[2] http://www.zen-kernel.org

Tags: ebuild, Gentoo, zen-sources

Comments

16 Responses to “zen-sources again on Gentoo”

Jon Hespano on October 15th, 2009 1:44 pm

That’s great! Gentoo might be all about choice, but if you want performance and flexibility, there’s no choice other than Gentoo. Thank you so much Markos for your work!
ph on October 15th, 2009 2:05 pm

Great news, hope they’ll come soon into the official tree, I’m getting sick&tired of overlays :/
Daniel Lange on October 15th, 2009 4:39 pm

The zen-sources link is broken, it should be http://www.zen-sources.org/ .
Keep on the good work! Daniel.
disi on October 15th, 2009 5:12 pm

Great stuff. I installed a system 2 days ago and wanted to use zen-sources, not in portage and no equivalent name in layman…

Nice to know what was going on :) Thanks, I’ll check today and if needed you get a bug report…
JesusSuperstar on October 16th, 2009 4:09 am

Good stuff. Keep em coming ;-)
Markos on October 16th, 2009 2:53 pm

zen-sources-2.6.30-r8 and 2.6.31-r4 will hit the tree within this weekend.

Thank you all for your feedback
nightmorph on October 16th, 2009 2:56 pm

This is a terrible idea. If our policy is to start putting broken, unstable, buggy, conflicting bleeding-edge stuff into Portage, let’s just directly import all our overlays, and replace all our default stable packages with those.

Seriously. I’ve read the bug comments, and pretty much they all boil down to upstream saying “use us because we have l33t features and zomg performance we can do benchmarks if you want to because we are c00l.”

I got news for ya, kid: benchmarks are crap. No one cares if it gets .034MB/sec more bandwidth. What matters is not performance, but stability. I take it no one has bothered to read all the bugs that have cropped up over time with zen-sources, both on their bugtracker and especially in the Gentoo forums.

For the last three years, Gentoo developers have been *reducing* the number of unsupported kernels in the tree in an effort to improve things. Please don’t reverse this. Just let it live in an overlay. There’s absolutely no compelling reason to move it into Portage — it won’t be supported by security or the kernel teams. People have been usnig layman just fine. Let ‘em continue to use layman if they want their weird kernels.
Markos on October 16th, 2009 3:05 pm

It is all about options Joshua. There are many users who would like to use those unsupported kernel sources. I plan to add a *good* warning message before somebody starts to build those kernel sources. Gentoo is full of power users ready to stretch their systems. Everybody understands that those sources is not for every user nor for users who seek security and stability. If you want, we can move this discussion on gentoo-dev mailing list to hear what the rest of us think about it.

In any case, I will never stabilize those sources. They are just for ~arch users who are willing to try and use them

I can’t see why is this a bad thing to do
ph on October 16th, 2009 6:34 pm

> let’s just directly import all our overlays
YES, PLEASE!

> and replace all our default stable packages with those
NO, throw them in a category like ‘unsupported-stuff’ – overlays are utter sh*t, imho, even worse when you need a lot of them(currently I need 8 + my own).
RealNC on October 17th, 2009 8:17 am

The upstream server is down, http://www.zen-sources.org is gone and it says “Zen-Sources is dead!” So not sure if including a dead project in Gentoo is such a terribly good idea :P
nightmorph on October 17th, 2009 2:47 pm

Well, I guess the whole thing is moot, unless someone revives the project under a different name.

Here’s the forum thread with all the ugly bickering and sordid drama:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-797741.html

Two days after posting about the new zen-sources mailing list, the founder took it offline.
RealNC on October 17th, 2009 5:01 pm

That’s good news and bad news at the same time. The good news is that it’s not really dead as I first thought. The bad side about it should be obvious :P
Markos on October 17th, 2009 7:56 pm

Indeed those are very sad news. The project it self it is not dead. I really really hope that the rest of developers will move it to a new domain soon. Many of us have the git repos cloned so the actual work is not lost. I hope they will get over it and get back online again

So for now, I had to mask zen-sources ebuilds :(

Sorry folks
CC on October 20th, 2009 5:18 am

It’s back at zen-kernel.org, thanks

And zen is certainly not an unstable kernel (unstable things have moved to a separate git tree) – Things have been stabilized in the zen-stable.git tree, and it includes a lot of code that developers want tested and that users want. And besides that fact, the linux kernel is not made for desktop usage – the zen kernel strives to be to the best of its ability for desktop usage, it will not benefit a production or server system.

Most bug reports received are related to problems found in the upstream kernel ANYWAY. There is at least 1 distribution who uses zen-stable as it’s DEFAULT kernel, and a couple others that offer it as options. Basically, stability is there. (check the git tree, not just a few comments)

Anyway, it’s supported by multiple kernel developers that are aware of its existence (those who are trying to push code into the linux kernel LOVE it because it provides a testing ground) – the userbase is somewhat large as well, the ratio of users to the ratio of bug reports is very positive (for zen-stable), zen.git is not advised to be used.

And just for the record, with the BFS cpu scheduler (1/2 the code of CFS) and the BFQ i/o scheduler you dont get just “.034MB/sec”, it’s significant improvements almost all the way across the board in desktop situations. If I felt it was worthless I would not have mentioned it, it’s part of proving how bad the linux kernel is for desktops.

Thanks guys, and Markos!
CC on October 20th, 2009 5:26 am

I’d also suggest that kernels like mm-sources could be removed, mm patches are no longer made – but mmotm (mm of the moment) is still updated on a weekly/bi-weekly basis. The mmotm.git repository is also hosted on zen-kernel.org (which automatically updates to the latest mmotm snapshot and shows each patch as a commit and what not)

I’m not so sure about git kernel ebuilds, but mm should probably be lost (i can’t possibly see anybody using it in reality, especially the old patches)
mithrandir on January 12th, 2010 3:17 am

I´m really happy, that zen development continues. I´m using zen-sources on several machines and zen-kernels always felt faster than stock or vanilla kernels. Well, and of course they had more features.

Thanks for adding zen sources to portage. For a while I posted ebuilds for zen sources in my blog on http://www.mygnu.de . Now I don´t have to anymore :)

mithrandir