[WARNING] Linux still not so much fun

[backwoodsman]

I'll concede that Linux is a passable desktop OS the day someone explains to me why flash performance has been, and still remains abysmal.

My three year old cannot play a silly game on PBSKids.org, slap Win10 on the box and it's butter.

At the moment I'm on an old HP nc4400 laptop with a 2GHz Core2Duo, Intel integrated graphics and Antix Linux (Debian 9). Bone stock install except for the addition of TDE desktop; nothing special at all done with video drivers, multimedia, etc. It came new with XP, and I imagine it would be a real dog with Win10. So I thought I'd give it a go with your silly games on pbskids.org. I tried several of the silliest ones I could find; all ran perfectly.

Your concession is accepted.

 

[Diggs]

I'm surprised at the new-found popularity of Manjaro being first at Distrowatch by a large margin over Mint and Ubuntu. (..but I should stay on topic....)

 

[ComputerRepairTech]

Why Raid 0? It's incredibly fast. Like SSD fast even using 10 year old commodity hard drives.


I would recommend for your own in-house or experimental use to try 3-disk Raid 0. You'll be amazed at the responsiveness. Put some of those stacks of old drives to use! Even stodgy old Win7 is quite peppy.

This is wrong. Did you test this before? The advantage to SSD is access time not transfer speed, access time is what makes things super responsive.

Edit: Well I mean unless you're loading some huge files.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Because Adobe? Hard pressed to find Flash content online these days, so don't expect any effort to make it better (from any party).

Which game?

Otherwise, have an upvote.

I'd have to go look, it's not like he's complaining. It can run like excrement and he's fine, he's three all he cares about is being able to click on stuff like his older siblings.

And Flash is everywhere, still no excuse to not be able to run the stuff efficiently, if anything the lack of updates from Adobe has made that reality easier. It's built into Chrome and Edge for crying out loud!

 

[sapphirescales]

I'd have to go look, it's not like he's complaining. It can run like excrement and he's fine, he's three all he cares about is being able to click on stuff like his older siblings.

And Flash is everywhere, still no excuse to not be able to run the stuff efficiently, if anything the lack of updates from Adobe has made that reality easier. It's built into Chrome and Edge for crying out loud!

Flash is dead. It's been dead for longer than anyone even realizes it. Flash was actually decent until Adobe got their hands on it from when they acquired Macromedia. Then Adobe ran it into the ground. I will always miss Macromedia Flash 8.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Flash is dead. It's been dead for longer than anyone even realizes it. Flash was actually decent until Adobe got their hands on it from when they acquired Macromedia. Then Adobe ran it into the ground. I will always miss Macromedia Flash 8.

You can say flash is dead all you want, but you're just making noise. There's a bucket of content out there, and my kid wants to consume it. And I'd rather not have Windows in play.

 

[Markverhyden]

All you have to do is go to the Distrowatch link @Diggs posted to get a Cliff's Notes view of why Linux has not made it big in the main stream desktop and laptop ecosystem. Just imagine if there were 25+ versions of Windoze, OS X, iOS, Android, etc each by a different company.

And Flash isn't dead. It's just taking a lot longer to fade away than other has been technologies.

 

[sapphirescales]

You can say flash is dead all you want, but you're just making noise. There's a bucket of content out there, and my kid wants to consume it. And I'd rather not have Windows in play.

Hey, I'm not any happier about it than you are. I'll miss a lot of flash based content. Historians are extremely concerned that future generations will know less about the 21st century than they do about even the 11th century since so much of our content is digital and changes so much. I mean think about it. You can barely use programs and games from 20 years ago unless you have the original hardware and software.

So much has been completely lost and it hasn't even been a quarter of a century yet. All those people that worked countless hours on old software...their work is totally gone now and no one can experience it. It's really sad. That's why I have a vintage computer room where I have computers from all eras (yes, including a Windows Vista computer). This stuff really needs to be preserved. Your kids' kids would probably enjoy this flash stuff too, but they won't be able to because it won't work on anything anymore.

 

[sapphirescales]

Yes, it bloody well has. And then some.

Kids today...

I'm talking specifically about games and programs from the early Windows days here. A lot of that stuff has been completely lost. Even more of the DOS stuff has been lost, but that's a tad bit more than the quarter of a century mark. It's still ridiculous that something 25 years old could be completely lost. In the past when everything was physical rather than digital, 100 year old antiques were commonplace. Even 500+ year old antiques were available (albeit very expensive). This is why modern historians are going to be completely in the dark when it comes to our history. We're erasing ourselves from history.

 

[Sky-Knight]

And here I thought I was the only one crazy enough to worry about crap like that. I got started on this crazy ride in IT because my uncle gave me a C64, a magazine with some games published in it, and I wanted to play. I was five and "programming". =/

My kids just consume, drives me nuts.

 

[LordIntruder]

My kids just consume, drives me nuts.

wrong parenting style.

 

[Alexey]

Back on topic, booting to RAID 0 is at best, a silly idea.
At worst, demonstrative of a lacking technical skill set bordering on the unprofessional. How exactly do you propose an operating system load its kernel when all you've got is drive access, and the kernel that has your striping configuration is itself striped?

Silly, well, maybe. However, the process of loading the OS during bootstrap is already complicated enough to involve various filesystem drivers, and adding one more layer on top of this is really not that difficult. There will be a limitation obviously, like some minimum limit on stripe size, but not very restrictive.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Silly, well, maybe. However, the process of loading the OS during bootstrap is already complicated enough to involve various filesystem drivers, and adding one more layer on top of this is really not that difficult. There will be a limitation obviously, like some minimum limit on stripe size, but not very restrictive.

No the limitation is you have to have a kernel with RAID support compiled in, no modules... which is dumb for all sorts of reasons, and a stripe size large enough to allow the kernel to live on a single disk. Then, and only then, does it boot. All other boot mechanisms utilize initramfs to build the boot partition in RAM from a single disk with a special partition on it. You still aren't booting to the RAID 0, you're booting to a single partition, loading it into RAM, using that environment to get at the RAID 0 and getting the rest of your files.

If you want to chase this as an academic exercise knock yourself out, but that's a ton of moving parts and a recipe for failure.

But the easy way out is to make a small 1gb partition for /boot, boot to that, and then you can have RAID 0 for /. You get the performance, but none of the boot insanity.

 

[Alexey]

Yes, I was thinking academic or some kind of testbed. Can't think of a valid reason for production use of this setup.

 

[Metanis]

Just for the fun of it I downloaded the latest evaluation copy of Server 2019 Datacenter edition. It installed like a champ and even had the correct driver already incorporated in the distribution to see the fake hardware raid array! Although it used the Win7 driver I had on flash drive as well as an experiment.

Obviously this is just a toy and I'm playing in my Lab. I would never recommend this for even a bad customer.

I even get why Linux devs aren't going to waste time coding for a situation that probably only has 0.001% implementation probability.

Next step is to stripe some of those silly little 60 and 64GB SSDs that have become so cheap!

 

[LordIntruder]

a situation that probably only has 0.001% implementation probability.

A Raid 0 for the OS installation has absolutely NO implementation probability. Write this down on every mirror, window, whiteboard and screen around you.

 

[Metanis]

A Raid 0 for the OS installation has absolutely NO implementation probability. Write this down on every mirror, window, whiteboard and screen around you.

Who made you God?

 

[GTP]

Who made you God?

He's not called "Lord" for no reason...

 

[Metanis]

So I've been thinking about this. All you supposed tech experts seem as afraid of Raid 0 as the Catholic priest's altar boy on confession Sunday.

Immediately it comes to me that we have been taught to use the wrong acronym. The very first word of RAID is redundant. And there is nothing redundant about a Stripe. So if you throw the word RAID away and think in terms of disk striping it helps. Striping is all about performance and absolutely nothing about safety or redundancy. I mean c'mon, you're not going to buy a Corvette to haul your 24' camping trailer.

And even if you guys are scared to death of Striping I think it's irrational. I'm no statistician but the probability of a catastrophic failure of multiple disks in a stripe is only slightly higher than the probability of any single disk failing. And if that single disk failed you'd have to recover it or reinstall. There is absolutely zero difference in your actions between a single disk failing and a stripe failing.

So what's the extra scary technician-cringing god-awful failure point on a stripe? As near as I can tell the only extra vulnerability would be an unrecoverable read error in the array signature. Again, an extremely small probability. And even if it happens what do you do? Replace the drive, reconfigure the array controller, write the new signature, then reinstall or re-image the machine. (Technically speaking, if you did a complete clone of the failed drive and then simply re-wrote the array signature on the new drive the system should be 100% usable again.)

Striping is a performance enhancement and it can be quite significant. There's no reason to fear it since modern disk controllers will continue to sense and correct the vast majorities of disk errors that occur. The fear is a holdover from old disk controllers that had little or no error correction built into them.

It's like that Corvette. You will have higher maintenance costs than the Corolla, but you know that up front. Striping is the same way, it will be higher maintenance but it's not brain surgery or rocket science. I can rebuild my 3-drive stripe, boot from a Win7 DVD, and restore from my USB-3 external drive in less than 30 minutes.

It's not for the casual end-user and I never said it was. So get outta that confessional and quit trying to excommunicate me.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Actually, a 3 disk stripe is exactly 3x more likely to fault than a single disk. That's statistically huge.

I've used RAID 0 before, just not for a boot volume. There are technically ugly things to do this with OS provided RAID 0 which is where this thread started.

Hardware provided RAID 0 would work.

The car analog isn't bad, but even a sports car has a starter. A small electric motor designed to start the far more powerful engine. That's your boot partition. Every machine needs one.

P.S. Odds of fault when using commodity junk drives? Even higher. Not that it matters if it's simply an experimental platform.