How I installed Gentoo on a Reiser4 partition


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Thread: How I installed Gentoo on a Reiser4 partition

  1. #1
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    How I installed Gentoo on a Reiser4 partition

    Yes, I realise that it's not entirely stable in Linux right now, but since all my important data has been backed up, I said to myself, "Why not?"

    LiveCDs: Which ones do I need?

    Since Reiser4 is not supported by the Gentoo developers (as of right now), none of their liveCDs will work. This has some bootable Gentoo ISOs. Although, I myself elected to just build reiser4 support into a mepis kernel, and do the Gentoo install that way. As far as I know, the LiveCDs provided by that site have most of the stages included (hopefully stage 1 )

    Installing

    instructions are probably the same as those in Gentoo's instructions except for a little detour when it comes to the kernel source (and of course formatting the partitions), but more on that later. If you are going to do a stage 1 install, you'll probably want to include NPTL support into your Gentoo system. You can do this by adding nptl into your USE= options (refer to Gentoo.org's documentation for more information on use options).

    Refer to this Gentoo forums thread for installing Gentoo with NPTL built in.

    Well first off, you would want to make sure you have reiser4progs installed first (if you have booted off one of those LiveCDs, you probably do). Create your partition table the way you would usually do in Gentoo (that mean, a root "/" partition, a boot "/boot" partition, and a swap partition). When it comes down to formatting the partitions, you would want the /boot partition to be any filesystem except reiser4. I like to use ext3 (mke2fs -j /dev/hdx#). Now the root "/" partition you will want to format with mkfs.reiser4 /dev/hdx# replace the x with the letter of the drive (like if it is the first drive on the primary master, it'd be hda, primary slave will be hdb, so on and so forth), and of course # with the number of the partition. Make the swap partition like normal.

    That's it for now, (until the kernel) you can follow whichever directions you like most. Remember the /etc/make.conf and emerge sync parts.

    Installing the Kernel

    I am sure the Reiser4 LiveCDs come with kernel patchsets that will allow you to build a kernel with reiser4 support, but since I didn't go that road (i installed Gentoo Linux with Mepis with a kernel with reiser4 included), I did a little search on the gentoo forums, and came across this thread in the documentations area. Now I could not get the example ebuild to work in his example directory to digest, so I just created a folder in the /usr/portage/sys-kernel folder entitled after one of the ones in the example, and that worked. You could use either the vanilla (2.6 not patched) kernels, or patch it along with the gentoo-dev-sources patches (reiser4-gentoo-dev-sources, wow that's a mouthful. )

    added: Be sure to disable 4K Stacks if you used to enabling them.

    I am going to guess that you already know how to make your config files (remember build reiser4 support into the kernel). After compile (if no errors), make modules_install, and cp System.map and arch/i386/boot/bzImage to the boot partition (remember to have it mounted).

    Booting

    If you are like me, you probably installed grub with your Gentoo install (I detest LILO). Since I already had grub installed at the time of install (via mepis), I just rebooted without installing it, and edited the grub config file (grub.conf or menu.lst in the /boot/grub/ folder) and pointed grub to the correct location of my new Linux install. It's probably a good thing the boot partition is ext3 (or 2, or reiser (version 3.6) depending what you did), since you'd probably need more patches to make grub work with reiser4. Just make your grub config like you normally would. And make sure in your fstab that the fs type for root to mount is reiser4 and not reiserfs. And make sure to emerge reiser4progs.

    There, that's how I did it. Whoo, I think I need a breath mint.

    DISCLAIMER: Remember, you do this at your own risk, don't blame me if it doesn't work for you. And remember to keep important data backed up!

    credits:
    Retsaw for pointing out the Reiser4 based LiveCDs to install Gentoo.
    kaise_sose (from the Gentoo forums) for developing those ebuilds.
    Loki3 for the link for the "Building Gentoo with NPTL" thread in the Gentoo forums. Coincidently...
    Snooper for writing that Gentoo forums thread.

    Of course I welcome comments from the community (including negative comments, I just hope that does not happen).
    Last edited by Seph64; 02-19-2005 at 03:14 PM.
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  2. #2
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    You may want to remind people that if they use a patchset with 4K stacks or 16K stacks (there's one of those out there too) to not enable either, or Reiser4 wont be an option.

  3. #3
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    Sep 2002
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    Yeah, almost forgot, thanks for the reminder.
    "Who is General Failure and why is he reading my Hard Drive?"
    Linux OSes I use: Gentoo, and Linux From Scratch.
    Current Screen Shot
    Join a good cause and start folding today!Join the Just Linux Regulars team!

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