I can’t quite figure out what would be the use cases where bcache would excel, except for hdds without cache or systems with very limited ram. Can you help me out with that?
The “cache” on HDDs is extremely tiny. Maybe a few seconds worth of sequential access at max. It does not exist to cache significant amounts of data for much longer than that.
At the sizes at which bcache is used, you could permanently hold almost all of your performance-critical data on flash storage while having enough space for tonnes of performance-uncritical data; all in the same storage “package”.
In my case, it basically helps me improve random read significantly. My NVMe is fast, like 3GB/s in sequential and 500MB/s in random, but it’s only 120GB. By using it as a cache in a bcache system, once a random read is performed, the data will be copied from HDD to SSD and if the data is requested again the random read will happen from SSD instead of HDD.
Thus, using it to play modern gaming is actually do able. Game that requires fast random read, like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Starfield.
As a lot of people in my og post mentioned, random is more important that sequential. Bcache by default disable sequential cache so you wont fill you cache to fast if a big data is being read, like watching movie, copying video, etc. That’s where Raid0 comes to the rescue. Having Raid0 with 2 drives basically double my sequential read and having 3 triples it.
Basically the idea is that if you have a lot of data, HDDs have much bigger capacities for the price, whereas large SSDs can be expensive. SSDs have gotten cheap, but you can get used enterprise drives on eBay with huge capacities for incredibly cheap. There’s 12TB HDDs for like $100. 12TB of SSDs would run you several hundreds.
You can slap bcache on a 512GB NVMe backed by a 8TB HDD, and you get 8TB worth of storage, 512GB of which will be cached on the NVMe and thus really fast. But from the user’s perspective, it’s just one big 8TB drive. You don’t have to think about what is where, you just use it. You don’t have to be like, I’m going to use this VM so I’ll move it to the SSD and back to the HDD when done. The first time might be super slow but subsequent use will be very fast. It also caches writes too, so you can write up to 512GB really fast in this example and it’ll slowly get flushed to the HDD in the background. But from your perspective, as soon as it’s written to the SSD, the data is effectively commited to disk. If the application calls fsync to ensure data is written to disk, it’ll complete once it’s fully written to the SSD. You get NVMe read/write speeds and the space of an HDD.
So one big disk for your Steam library and whatever you play might be slow on the first load but then as you play the game files gets promoted to the NVMe cache and perform mostly at NVMe speeds, and your loading screens are much shorter.
I don’t know, it’s going to depend a lot on usage pattern and cache hit ratio. It will probably do a lot more writes than normal to the cache drive as it evicts older stuff and replaces it. Everything has tradeoffs in the end.
Another big tradeoff depending on the cache mode (ie. writeback mode) if the SSD dies, you can lose a fair bit of data. Not as catastrophic as a RAID0 would but pretty bad. And you probably want writeback for the fast writes.
Thus I had 2 SSDs and 2 HDDs in RAID1, with the SSDs caching the HDDs. But it turns out my SSDs are kinda crap (they’re about as fast as the HDDs for sequential read/writes) and I didn’t see as much benefit as I hoped so now they’re independent ZFS pools.
So one big disk for your Steam library and whatever you play might be slow on the first load but then as you play the game files gets promoted to the NVMe cache and perform mostly at NVMe speeds, and your loading screens are much shorter.
I really love/hate how you can immediately understand the practical application of new technologies through the use of games.
Any chance there’s a Debian repo for bcachefs? I’d want to see how it does on an extra drive in my server. Or will I have to compile it the old fashioned way?
For bcache, it is available in apt, I think. You just need to set the ppa. For bcachefs, I think you need to wait for 6.7 to land on Debian or compile it yourself.
GNOME Shell 45 moved to ESM (ECMAScript modules). That means you MUST use the standard import declaration instead of relying on the previous imports.* approach.
<span style="color:#323232;">import Clutter from 'gi://Clutter';
</span><span style="color:#323232;">import Gio from 'gi://Gio';
</span><span style="color:#323232;">import * as Main from 'resource:///org/gnome/shell/ui/main.js'
</span><span style="color:#323232;">import * as Volume from 'resource:///org/gnome/shell/ui/status/volume.js';
</span>
well that’s what I tried, but how would I know where Volume is located in the path 'gi:// … '. Is there any way of browsing / exploring the jave files to that I can actually know what the path is?
I edited my comment with an example for your code and my best advice for figuring out the path of gnome shell imports is by browsing /usr/share/gnome-shell/js/, the docs are not very helpful.
It is very likely the wrong path, I just extrapolated the path from the gnome-shell git repo. I don’t use Gnome myself, I’m on the enemy team using LXDE on Devuan ;)
Just to clarify. The gi:// resources are GObject Introspection modules which are used for multilanguage bindings to native libraries. On my system, GI modules are found in /usr/share/gir-1.0/ . They’re just imported by name and sometimes version using gi:// (there are examples in the link in my first comment).
As I don’t have Gnome installed I can’t be sure of the path to gnome shell modules imported using resource://, but it’s probably the path I wrote, but without js/.
I actually think 2024 has a very good chance of being the year of wayland, scene graph api just got finished wlroots side, wine is rapidly approaching ready for wayland, sway-side all that’s missing is global shortcuts and single window capture (and disabling vsync for games is about to be merged, if you care about that).
It’s all rapidly shaping up, they even fixed nightlight nvidia side. I think it all depends on nvidia fixing shit.
With GNOME and KDE going Wayland only, it is all but over for X. Qt, GTK, and Electron already work on Wayland so most apps are ready. Cinnamon, XFCE, Enlightenment, and MATE all have Wayland plans now. There are a few compositor libraries that other window managers and desktop environments can leverage.
NVIDIA is slowly getting their act together. Many of the legitimate complainants are being addressed. There are desirable features starting to appear that are Wayland only. Even non-Linux systems are adding Wayland support.
It is hard to believe after so many years but I think that, by Christmas 2024, most Linux users will have stopped using X and maybe even stopped talking about it.
Ah I see now way you wanted the first extension. Natively you have to scroll on the right part of the panel around the volume icon to change the volume. Not in the middle of the panel
yeah okay so that’s the same on GNOME on every distro. The icon is too small so it takes too long to get the mouse just right just to change the volume a bit.
Disclosure: I bought one because of the idea and dream. It’s…okay-ish. I love the idea, but the execution is going to be a time-based thing. They need to fix a lot of issues with power consumption, and I get this will take time, but I just don’t understand where their projections for performance and battery life came from on Linux. They have entire papers written on the subject, and a lot of documentation on specific kernel issues and distros, but this is like a Beta. I’m afraid for the 16" AMD version I’m also expecting soon, but got delayed. I REALLY want to love this project, but it’s not there yet.
I’ve had mine since they launched and haven’t had any major complaints, I’d my Linux experience so far has been about same as on previous laptops. Though I will say that it does get fairly toasty.
I have the same feelings. I was in the market for a laptop after a long time of desktop use only. I went for it because I love the idea of owning my hardware without any corporate bullshit. But the whole laptop feels very beta, which can be OK, but the price is also quite high.
Pros:
formfactor, I love the screen
switches for camera and mic
open source & Linux
Firmware Updates are a breeze
easy access to hardware
you can use your own ram and disk
Magnets, everywhere
Cons:
They promised shipment early Q3 for batch 1, I got it early Q4
opening the laptop is quite hard, the groove is to small/finicky
I hate the expansion cards. They are too hard to pop out, you need so much power to get them out.
only four ports, that’s if you don’t count your power supply. Very weak
clicking with the TouchPad is very mid, borderline bad
restarting causes my power supply to stop working, I need to unplug and insert it again. And I mean I need to unplug the power supply, not the laptop.
graphics problems, constant noise artifacts
default sound is very bad, search for equalizer Configs, it makes the speakers bearable
black screens where I need to close the lid, wait for sleep and open again for me to be able to work again
Fingerprint reader does not work
General Linux Problems, Kubuntu has a few issues, other distros might have a better experience
no worldwide shipping. I’m waiting for my visa for Japan and won’t be able to get any shipping of replacement parts over there.
On a sidenote, I probably broke my screen a few days ago while trying the fix/debug the graphics/noise problems. I don’t know how I fucked up, but 5cm of the screen is permanently black now… On a positive note, replacing it supposedly is quite easy. I hope they ship it fast.
Some of those Cons sound pretty bad, especially the graphics problems. A lot of those I figure I could live with, but some, like the constant noise on the graphics or a low-quality touchpad would be just too much to tolerate.
I am currently awaiting my (pretty damn expensive) Framework 16 at this time, and I can only hope my experience will be a bit better than yours…
I don’t know if those are Amd, framework or Linux issues and who is to blame. The cpu is very new so there might be more driver issues than normal. Hopefully these issues get resolved with future updates. The first firmware update didn’t help my issues.
Most of the time the noise is negligible, but with dark screens and resource intensive tasks it gets more noticeable and pronounced. But it’s better than the screen tearing other users experience.
I’m wishing you luck that most of the issues are resolved when they ship the framework 16. I’m very tempted to get that one as well, just for a custom ortho keyboard if they ever make one…
Not all of that is true, you who seems to be from Framework. Did you fix the ACPI issues? How about the SLEEP modes? Anything being done about the crazy battery drain on AMD chips?
Those are my personal experiences, they might not be representative for all users, but those are my issues. I don’t work for framework amd can’t give you updates regarding support issues.
I’ve been daily driving a first gen 13"/i7 model for 2 years now. It’s not the best laptop I’ve ever owned, but it’s my favorite.
Battery dies in sleep, sometimes it won’t wake up… honestly things I can live with. In exchange, I’ve been able to increase ram, replace the screen, and upgrade the back panel myself. I’ve also switched up my port configuration twice over the 2 years and that’s been super convenient.
It’s like running a less mainstream desktop environment: It’s got rough edges, but I picked it for reasons besides stability and consistency.
I’m going to grab an AMD mainboard next year instead of buying a new laptop, and will turn the old mobo into a server for my website.
Idk, it’s got issues, but no more than any other laptop I’ve run Linux on. It’s good enough and I smile every time I pull it out of my bag and see the gear logo (even when it turns out it died in my bag lol)
Title seems to suggest that Alma Linux is somehow not free software, which is not justified at all by the article. Unless they are trying to say RHEL is free of charge? Which is also not true or mentioned in the text.
I sounds like you have to apply new cooling paste. This might be a pain to do on a laptop but certainly worth it. Another distro probably won’t do the trick, whether it’s minimal or not.
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