Just backported the current Siduction 4.19-18 kernel

[stevepusser]

to a Stretch base for MX 17, since Debian is still on 4.19 rc 7 in Experimental. The 4.19-18 is based on 4.19.4 and 4.19.5 rc1. I had a bit of trouble re-enabling the i386 architecture build, but found out how to do that eventually.

Basically I wanted to see if any updated DKMS packages would fail to build in it, but virtualbox 5.2.22, Nvidia 390.87, ndiswrapper, bbswitch, and broadcom-sta all succeeded. The only ones I had the hardware to test was bbswitch, Nvidia, and Vbox, and they all work fine. We'd really like MX 18 to have a backported debian 4.19 kernel, but that's vapor right now.

I can add it to that "new hardware" repo on the OBS that I have set up for Stretch if anyone is interested.

[pcalvert]

Sounds good. I used the backports kernel for a few months, but dumped it and went back to the stock kernel about a month ago. Since doing that, I noticed that the OS boots up noticeably faster. It's still not as fast as it was before I installed intel-microcode, though.

Phil

[piper]

iirc the 4.9-13 was the last kernel for i386 in siduction

[stevepusser]

Well, as soon as I did that Siduction kernel, Debian finally released a 4.19.5 kernel in Experimental yesterday, so we'll probably go with that in MX 18 if it passes testing after I backport it to Stretch, since 4.19 should be the LTS kernel in Buster...Siduction also has a new kernel release, which I think they do about twice a week.

[sunrat]

I'm a regular siduction user and appreciate the work towo does with the kernel. It's also a good alternative to Liquorix for low-latency multimedia as it's config includes CONFIG_PREEMPT=y and CONFIG_HZ_1000=y

[stevepusser]

I'm putting the 4.19.5 Debian backport kernel in my now-hardware-support OBS repo alongside the 4.18.10 kernel.

It seems that the 4.19 kernels now want the AMD amdgpu firmware in an amdgpu folder instead of /radeon where even the latest Debian firmware packages put it. There's always the manual update and install firmware procedure (requires git and make be installed):

Code: Select all

mkdir -p ~/linux
cd ~/linux
git clone
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/
cd linux-firmware
sudo make install

or use root for the last line.
I wonder if Siduction has updated firmware.

[sunrat]

I wonder if Siduction has updated firmware.

Current versions are 20180825+dfsg-1

[stevepusser]

I wonder if Siduction has updated firmware.

Current versions are 20180825+dfsg-1

I just found out that the user reporting that was using older firmware than Debian's latest, and another developer reported 20180825.1 did have the new amdgpu folder populated, so we'll see. That firmware is already in the OBS repo.

[sunrat]

In siduction I also have /lib/firmware/amdgpu/ with 134 files all dated 30/8/18. No AMD hardware on this system though.

[stevepusser]

Now getting reports that the 4.19 kernel wants a lot more firmware files in amdgpu than the latest Debian packages provides. You actually need the kernel to detect the hardware and try and load the amdgpu driver to see the error messages.

Here's what the upstream firmware git repo has in amdgpu: https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm ... er/amdgpu/

Quite a lot more than in firmware-amd-graphics 20180825.1.

It's also going to affect Siduction users with that hardware that update to their 4.19 kernel, no way around that.

[piper]

We haven't seen reports on our forums about this with kernel 4.19/4.20

https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/11/27/984

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=201685

This one is in german

https://www.pro-linux.de/news/1/26550/d ... x-419.html

[stevepusser]

I think the messages are benign, since the kernel's firmware repo doesn't even have those files. Many drivers go through a list of possible firmware files until they find one they can load, throwing those scary warnings. As long as the GPU works anyway, great.

[stevepusser]

FWIW, I now have the upstream Debian 4.19.0-1 kernel, based on 4.19.5, in my OBS repo alongside 4.18.0-2, based on 4.18.10. I decided to go with that instead of the Siduction kernel. I did bump the kernel context switch frequency to 1000 Hz from 250, like the Siduction kernel does. To add the repo:

As root (sudo users can become root with "sudo su"), copy and paste the whole command from the code block:

add the repo

Code: Select all

echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/stevenpusser:/new-hardware-support/Debian_9.0/ /' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/home:stevenpusser:new-hardware-support.list

download and install the repo key

Code: Select all

rm -f Release.key && wget -nv https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:stevenpusser:new-hardware-support/Debian_9.0/Release.key -O Release.key && apt-key add - < Release.key && rm Release.key

update package database

Code: Select all

apt update

Updates from the repository are now available to your system. They'll be seen as automatic updates for packages like Mesa, but kernels must be installed manually.