Polynomial-C's IT blog

Since 2003 I only use Linux as operating system on any of the computers I own.
Back in 2010 my decision to buy an eSATA expansion card for my computer was because USB3 still wasn't widely spread, USB3 support in Linux still was kinda experimental and all my external hard drive enclosures already supported eSATA but not USB3 and I didn't want to buy the rare and expensive USB3 enclosures that were available on german market.
So I decided to buy an eSATA expansion card and my choice fell on a Sonnet Tempo SATA X4P although the manufacturer's website didn't mention Linux support at all. I naively thought that it shouldn't be that hard to get the card working as it has a well supported Marvell chip from which I knew that the latest Linux kernels already support it (CONFIG_SATA_MV).
Unfortunately I was wrong with my assumption.

I only use so called LTS (Long Term Support) Linux kernel versions and the versions I used through the years all didn't work with the card:

3.2.x
3.4.x
3.10.x
3.12.x
3.14.x
3.18.x

This was such a frustrating experience that I even wrote a forum entry in the Gentoo Forum about this.

I didn't try with 4.1.x Linux kernel series but two weeks ago I tried to use the card again with Linux kernel version 4.4.6 and this time it succeeded. So anywhere between the Linux kernel versions 3.18 and 4.4.6 there might have been committed a fix to the Linux kernel that makes the card finally useful for me

I'm not really much into games anymore but from time to time I'd like to play some of the old 3D shooters I used to play back in the early 2000 years.
So after using my trusty Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 for over six years (with open source radeon driver) I decided to renew my graphics device, again with a Radeon card from Sapphire. I chose the model R9 285 which has a so called Tonga chip on it and thus requires the quite new amdgpu driver instead of radeon.
Well, long story short, even with the latest 4.5.x kernel version the card doesn't work in my system. The 4.2.x and 4.3.x kernel series ran into kernel panics where 4.5.x kernel series only blanks the screen and shows some error messages in dmesg output.
I've opened up a bug report but with no response yet from anybody. I wonder if it's my quite old Tyan mainboard which only provides PCI-E of the first generation but without any kernel developer at least looking at the bug I'm quite lost here. Seems like I now own a brand new AMD Radeon card which I cannot use other than letting it collect dust in my shelf.

Hi,

after the debacle of latest openssl security bump I decided to jump the gap and remove ssl2 and ssl3 protocoll entirely from my systems. Thus I added a dev-libs/openssl package to my personal overlay which does exactly that. This also requires most openssl consuming packages to be recompiled to work properly again. I added a couple of packages that need additional ssl3 removal patches to my overlay as well. If you find other packages to fail, please inform me about them via email.

Kind regards
Polynomial-C

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

Today I created new gpg keys for my work with Gentoo.
This was long overdue as my old primary key still is 1024bit DSA.
These facts and my wish to have a GLEP63 compliant set of gpg keys motivated me to create the new set.
A big thank you to Kristian Fiskerstrand who helped me in creating the keys.

So here's the IDs of my new key:

0x498FE765960E9B39

Kind regards
Lars
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v2
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=sBiU
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

I took the opportunity to add make-4.0 to portage. As I found at least glibc not liking the new make I added it package masked for now.
Please help us finding all possible problems with the new make version. If you want to help, unmask the package

echo ">=sys-devel/make-4.0" >> /etc/portage/package.unmask

and start compiling packages with it. If you find problems open a new bug in our bug reporting database and make that bug block the tracker bug.