Has 812 been the end of the road for any other machines?

[chiefengineer]

I run create_ap on 810 with a slightly older Dell Vostro. It supports quite a network very well. I got this
new, cool MT76 (powerful Mediatek USB dongle) fully supported by 812.

Thus, I tested 812 intending to up my bandwidth. Alas, kernel panic. Every iteration of every option
(small initrd, UEFI, hybrid iso, slow bios option, no peripherals, you name it---except for the radeon blacklist which
displays nothing but still crashes).

It goes by so fast after appearing to almost load all I can see is parsing faults and kernel panic. I don't expect
any solution here, just perhaps some similar experiences? It would appear to me some kernel firmware is
puking on something, so I am stuck with hooking the MT76 driver out of the 812 kernel and trying that with 810, which is
not the kind of fishing I like to do.

[April]

I think I would start by checking out your memory capabilities first? Maybe its too fast for it?

Proverbs 8:12 NIV
“I, wisdom, dwell together with prudence; I possess knowledge and discretion.
NIV: New International Version

Please don't send me letters . I'm a confirmed and permanent Athiest.

[rcrsn51]

@chiefengineer: Just to clarify: is your problem specific to running the MT76 WiFi adapter as an access point?

Or is the problem with getting Fatdog 812 to boot up at all?

[JakeSFR]

I think it's the problem with booting itself...

@chiefengineer: Perhaps upgrading to a newer kernel would help. The latest we have in repo is 5.10.63 (How to use a different kernel).

Also, I've read somewhere that acpi=off boot option helped somebody with a similar issue.

Posting a photo of that kernel panic could help as well in diagnosing what's causing it.

Greetings!

[chiefengineer]

Yes, the problem is booting at all. Kernel panic then a black screen real fast.
Will try to capture it but very difficult. Purpose of upgrade is to run driver
not contained in kernel version of 8XX<12 that boots perfectly. Thanks for replies;
I will continue to work on this.

[chiefengineer]

So I took some actual photos (unfortunately the flash comes on) of the screens. One shows vmlinuz loading then trying to load initrd...the second shows the near-immediate result: a long list of attempts to write and populate followed by kernel panic.

acpi=off resulted in the same

This machine is an AMD Sempron 3600+ with 1Gb Ram and LOTS of great hardware and connectivity on it and worked without a reboot for years running less than 812. Is the 1GB not enough all of a sudden?

[p310don]

Is your download of 812 ok? MD5 check? Re-download

[chiefengineer]

Yes, the MD5 checks out and it is on a USB key that boots other machines just fine. It also fails on a second USB key and slot. It seems (and I am purely guessing) that the initrd loads, then vmlinuz on top of it exceeds some memory capacity. Other than that, this machine has a Broadcomm wireless card, an actual modem, ethernet, 4 USB, DVD drive, serial VGA (no HDMI)...so maybe there is some firmware that has changed in some new kernel code panics over. I guess I could have a bios virus as it was ethernetted to the web 24/7.

[JakeSFR]

Is the 1GB not enough all of a sudden?

Yes, I think this might be the culprit.
Although FD can boot in QEmu with only 1G, in case of a real hardware, some of the RAM can be seized by GPU as VideoRAM and hence inaccessible for CPU.
Maybe 812's initrd size crossed the threshold.

You still should be able to boot it, but with small initrd (unless you already do). You need another machine to split it, though.
Here's how: http://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/web/fa ... nitrd.html

Oh, and while doing so, be wary that this:
"[...] if you have less than 2 GB of RAM and you don't use swap, you'd better specify a different location or Fatdog can lock-up due to running out of memory when doing the splitting."
may not necessarily be still true for 812 and newer versions. If you have less than 4G of ram, I'd use a different location (must be a POSIX-compliant partition, so EXT2/3/4, BTRFS, etc.), just in case.

Greetings!

[chiefengineer]

Thanks, I am on it...and yes, I had installed this to the USB key using the small initrd for legacy bios.

[mikewalsh]

@chiefengineer :-

Is the 1GB not enough all of a sudden?

To put it in a nutshell.....NO. Hasn't been for long enough, TBH.

I know we're all very fond of quoting ISO sizes, but folks tend to forget that ISO contents expand considerably when installed or running. This is as true of Puppies or Dogs as it is of FatDog itself.

ALL OS's - whether Windoze, Crapple, OR Linux - are unfortunately getting larger and larger as time goes by. Folks demand more & more features, and while the Puppy ethos has always traditionally been to keep the coding small, light & tight, this isn't always possible.....because dependencies/libs themselves are getting larger & larger due to all the extra features they now contain.

Qt5 is one of the biggest culprits here. Developers the world over are building more & more apps around the Qt Framework, and some of the 'core' QT libs alone now occupy several MB by themselves! And the new Qt6 is an order of magnitude larger again. The complete Qt6 'framework', with all bells & whistles installed, would pretty much fill your RAM all by itself, and is around 3 times the size of many of our community ISOs; I discovered this by accident the other day, when investigating an app I was thinking of putting into 'portable' format. It had a separate 'qt6' directory. Total size? 'Properties' indicated a hair under 900 MB...!!

It appeared that the developers, instead of only including the necessary modules, had instead slapped the entire framework into the tarball .....purely for the hell of it.

-------------------------------

And the Puppy/Dog/FatDog communities have also moved on. Where many of us used to run fairly resource-limited hardware, a good many members are now running far more powerful machines than we ever dreamed possible at one time. For most, a decent browser is a must.....and modern browsers are, to put it bluntly, RAM-hogs. It's quite normal for a Chromium-based browser to use 1 GB all by itself with just a couple of tabs open, largely due to the sandbox that every tab runs in.....and frankly, modern-day devs are getting lazy, in large part due TO that explosion of hardware capabilities. There's no longer the need to keep the coding economical..!

"Rule-of-thumb" nowadays says that for a reasonable experience, 4 GB should be considered a practical minimum. That's if you want to be able to multi-task, and do more than one thing at a time....

C'est la vie, unfortunately. There are very, very few machines still in circulation that fit the 'parameters' that used to be more-or-less 'standard' when Puppy first hit the scene.....yet too many Puppy users still live in the world of 20 years ago, thinking that Puppies will always be as tiny as they once were.

It can't be done. As Mr. Scott of the "Enterprise" was wont to say, "Ye cannae break the laws of physics, laddie....."

Mike.

[chiefengineer]

I have this 19 yr. old Emachine laptop that has great peripherals (especially the Ath9K wireless card):
2650e Athon and 2GB RAM (it says 1738Mb avaliable to Linux...wonder why).
It runs 812 with the humongous initrd and Seamonkey with UBlock legacy and screams.
It also has a busted screen and keyboard...but goes serial to a Flatscreen TV/Stereo via
serial and RCA jacks. The keyboard is a tiny USB lighted $10 Chinese device.

My house is full of these relics...some run cameras, others stereos...while I have more powerful
Raspberry Pi's these work better. Fatdog has been a great blessing to my life.

Note: I am finally getting that 1Gb Vostro to boot 812 using tiny initrd on a USB...I wonder how much
WindowsXP affected the memory...it is still installed on a hard drive partition and boot.ini is
part of the legacy path.

It seems to me the culprit of bloatware has always been Windoz...it was once part of all these laptops
I have ...seems like they were under-spec'd out of the box, requiring at least a RAM upgrade to perform.
Seemed like a win-win for the mfg and MS both...they lock you into a future of expenditures.
Even the expiring freeware on those machines (like anti-virus) made surfing like watching paint dry.
Things like Fatdog never have had an performance issue...except for browsers like Firefox 97 which hang the whole
machine sans script-blocker. Seems like a shame Linux is headed similarly, but it is apparent
my forever-spoiledness is coming to an end.