Category Archives: Hacks

Hardware – Inexpensive Small Linux Laptop..

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After some research, I decided to use an Intel-powered ex-Chromebook for my portable Linux project..    I settled on an Acer Chromebook c720p, as this could be ‘converted’ to run Linux natively, rather than in emulation via Crouton..    There are several articles on this, but I found useful info (and a chassis/mobo diagram) here:  https://ankitrasto.wordpress.com/2015/02/06/clean-installing-linux-on-the-acer-c720pc720-chromebook-a-complete-guide/ If you are … Continue reading →

Kernel – 4.11 released, Patched VMware OK, NVIDIA Still Not OK..

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Kernel 4.11 Final is out, a week later than planned, and brief details of changes from -rc8 are here:  http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1704.3/04608.html As expected, VMware 12.5.5 with the 4.11 patches is still OK (see http://rglinuxtech.com/?p=1932 ), but there is still no ‘legal’ solution for the latest NVIDIA driver – 381.09 (see https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1002820/linux/-patch-381-09-kernel-4-11-rc5/ ): …………….. Building modules, stage 2. MODPOST … Continue reading →

NVIDIA – Still no 4.11 Solution, but a ‘Good’ Patch for Old Version..

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Kernel 4.11 ‘final’ has been delayed for a week, and -rc8 has been released..     4.11-patched VMware 12.5.5 is OK, but there is still only a ‘Bad’ (illegal licence modification) patch for the latest NVIDIA driver..   (see https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1002820/linux/-patch-381-09-kernel-4-11-rc5/ ) But, if you have an older card, there is a valid patch for driver 340.102 – which does not … Continue reading →

Kernel – 4.11-rc1 and BTRFS – a Warning..?

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I encountered a catastrophic problem with btrfs formatted system disk partition corruption, shortly after updating a test system to Kernel 4.11-rc1. To put this in context, this may be an isolated incident, and I have not seen problems – so far – mentioned elsewhere..    But.. there a quite a lot of BTRFS changes on 4.11, and – … Continue reading →

VMware – Not Working with Fedora 26 – GCC 7, and Workarounds..

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UPDATE:  The vmware runtime fix shown here has not worked since version 12.5.6, and the solution is in a later article:  http://rglinuxtech.com/?p=1992 I have recently updated one crash-and-burn system to Fedora 26 (alpha/testing) and have encountered two problems with VMware and the ‘bleeding edge’ version of GCC included.. The first problem sounded very familiar, and it is a … Continue reading →

NVIDIA – Kernel 4.11 Fix Available, but not ‘Legal’..

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There is a fix/patch available now, for NVIDIA driver 378.13 on Kernel 4.11, but it involves modifying the licence on NVIDIA code, and so is not legal.. Details – and links to discussions – here:  https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/995636/?comment=5101210 Some previous changes to Kernel code enforcing GPL-only licensing had been reverted, but looking at the correspondence on the Linux Kernel … Continue reading →

VMware – Patch for Kernel 4.11 Support..

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Thanks to Virgo, there are now patches for vmnet and vmmon with Kernel 4.11 (see his comments under the earlier article).    These are incremental patches, for application to VMware 12.5.2 code already patched for Kernel 4.9/4.10 support.. Links are here:   http://pastebin.com/McqmUf0u     and    http://pastebin.com/yjbDHiSX I have modified these (adding appropriate #if LINUX_VERSION_CODE…… #endif statements) to be backward-compatible with … Continue reading →

NVIDIA – New 410 Patch – With Hotplug Support..

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Thanks to Alberto Milone, there is now a patch for the latest NVIDIA driver, which is reported to include ‘hotplug’ support :https://pkgs.rpmfusion.org/cgit/nonfree/nvidia-kmod.git/plain/kernel_4.10.patch I can confirm that this compiles OK when applied to driver 378.13, with kernel 4.10.   I am not able to test hotplug functionality, as I do not have a suitable system..   So..  YMMV… Thanks to … Continue reading →

NVIDIA – New Drivers, Still Broken with 4.10 – And a Patch for 378.13..

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NVIDIA have released new drivers 375.39 (‘long term’) and 378.13 (‘short term’) and details are here:  http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/114708/en-us and http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/115031/en-us. Both still fail to compile with Kernel 4.10 (tested with 4.10-rc8) and I tried the previous 378.09 patch against 379.13, but it failed to apply cleanly, as more code has changed.. $ cat nv-37809-410-patch.patch |patch -p0 patching file … Continue reading →

VMware – Updated vmnet Patch for Kernel 4.9/4.10..

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Thanks to Mikkel Kroman, there is a more complete patch for VMware 12.5.2  vmnet on Kernel 4.9.x and 4.10-rc’s: The change is to the get_user_pages parameter list, to now include the FOLL_WRITE parameter, and is as follows: In vmnet-only/userif.c, around line 113, change #if LINUX_VERSION_CODE >= KERNEL_VERSION(4, 6, 0) retval = get_user_pages(addr, 1, 1, 0, &page, NULL); … Continue reading →