Void Linux thread

[Hasturtium]

In this case there isn't one - I switched to using a crossover connection between the BMC ethernet port on the Blackbird and the ethernet port on the Ryzen computer sitting next to it, running Ubuntu 22.04 from a thumb drive.

[MPC7500]

And the IP address of your Ryzen or any other device which is connected with the internet?

[Hasturtium]

Update: the early batch of Blackbird motherboards apparently had a glitch in their BMC firmware that was supposed to be ironed out prior to manufacture. Support was patient and helpful, and sent me a flashing tool and ROM, and things are now working. I'm glad I wasn't *that* bad at following directions, and thank you so much for trying to help.

[ClassicHasClass]

Very interesting.

[Borley]

You have to set the correct time / date.

I’ve been trying, but whether I use date within the skiroot shell to set the date or within Void itself, it doesn’t seem to stick. Forgive me, I’m new to this - can you show me how?

edit: to clarify, date appears to update correctly, but hwclock remains firmly convinced that it is June 8th, and nothing I’ve been able to do disabuses it of the notion. I’ve tried syncing the system time to the hardware clock so they’re at least both wrong to the same extent, but networking still doesn’t work

edit the second: I skipped connecting to the BMC initially, which is where I’m supposed to initially set the date. D’oh. I’ll take care of that this week and pray until then.

The options through BMC can be either NTP or manually set. I'm interested to see what works for you, since I've found both to be a bit fussy.

[ClassicHasClass]

I use NTP, though I have a local stratum 1 server on the internal network (GPS).

[Hasturtium]

You have to set the correct time / date.

I’ve been trying, but whether I use date within the skiroot shell to set the date or within Void itself, it doesn’t seem to stick. Forgive me, I’m new to this - can you show me how?

edit: to clarify, date appears to update correctly, but hwclock remains firmly convinced that it is June 8th, and nothing I’ve been able to do disabuses it of the notion. I’ve tried syncing the system time to the hardware clock so they’re at least both wrong to the same extent, but networking still doesn’t work

edit the second: I skipped connecting to the BMC initially, which is where I’m supposed to initially set the date. D’oh. I’ll take care of that this week and pray until then.

The options through BMC can be either NTP or manually set. I'm interested to see what works for you, since I've found both to be a bit fussy.

I ended up doing both: set the time manually, then set a NIST IP address and reset to NTP. Then I selected Both for the clock control after the first time didn’t propagate settings from the BMC/hardware clock to the system clock. I don’t know what the Split option does - anybody have insight there?

[Hasturtium]

Another dumb question: I've installed xscreensaver and would like to use it instead of xfce4-screensaver. However, disabling xfce4-screensaver at startup via the Settings Manager's Session and Startup Application Autostart entry doesn't appear to do the trick. And despite entering xscreensaver settings manually and asserting that I want it to run, xfce4-screensaver periodically restarts itself and interferes with the process. What's the best procedure to follow?

[MPC7500]

Dumb question? Good question. I have no idea, I don't use xfce. since it's not a PowerPC specific problem you could ask the void or xfce community, if you don't get an answer here.
https://www.reddit.com/r/voidlinux/

I do the same, because most of my topics aren't PowerPC specific.

I googled, maybe this helps?
https://www.addictivetips.com/ubuntu-linux-tips/change-the-screensaver-on-xfce/

[Hasturtium]

Just a heads up - it looks like Void Linux ppc64 is winding down, and will be replaced by Chimera Linux going forward. Details outlined here.

[MPC7500]

Yes. Easier to maintain and better than Void. Still, too bad, since I'm pretty familiar with Void by now. The Void docs are pretty good.

[rjzak]

Regarding Void's (and Chimera's) use of 4k pages, how is this used with Qemu & virt-manager? Virt-manager is nice since it creates the XML for libvirt, but I run into the issue where Qemu complains about wanting 64k pages, but not being able to do so on 4k pages.

The Void PPC doc has an entry regarding this: https://docs.voidlinux-ppc.org/configuration/virtualization.html
Which specifies to use -machine pseries,cap-hpt-max-page-size=4096.

How is this specified in the virt-manager or libvirt XML? Looking at https://libvirt.org/drvqemu.html, the closest I could find is using <qemu:commandline>, but that doesn't help, nor does adding the page size flag to machine="pseries".

[Corvidae]

Regarding Void's (and Chimera's) use of 4k pages, how is this used with Qemu & virt-manager? Virt-manager is nice since it creates the XML for libvirt, but I run into the issue where Qemu complains about wanting 64k pages, but not being able to do so on 4k pages.

The Void PPC doc has an entry regarding this: https://docs.voidlinux-ppc.org/configuration/virtualization.html
Which specifies to use -machine pseries,cap-hpt-max-page-size=4096.

How is this specified in the virt-manager or libvirt XML? Looking at https://libvirt.org/drvqemu.html, the closest I could find is using <qemu:commandline>, but that doesn't help, nor does adding the page size flag to machine="pseries".

Something like this should work:

<features>
    <hpt resizing="required">
      <maxpagesize unit="KiB">4</maxpagesize>
    </hpt>
</features>

It's not mentioned in any libvirt documentation I could find - I think I had to end up reading through the unit tests to find where this option was.

[rjzak]

Wow, that did it! Thank you!