Updating Gentoo from image questions.

Just to watch "cat /proc/io_status" (only applies if your not on a new host with the CFQ-TS patches, which if you just signed up, chances are you're on one of the new hosts), and keep these tips in mind:

http://www.linode.com/wiki/index.php/Gentoo

Setting MAKEOPT="-j1" is highly recommended as well.

In what way is it "b0rking" your Linode? Why does emerge stop? Are you overwriting config files using etc-update that your not watching or don't understand? I could use a little more clarification on the problem.

I don't know where or why it's stopping. Sometime after running either of those commands I can't login via ssh and lish get's me to a command prompt but I can't manually start or restart anything.

I haven't gotten a prompt to update etc files and I'm not running it at the prompt in lish.

That's all the clarification I can give I think. I've just deleted everything and am starting over from scratch, being a lot more careful about what I'm doing at each step. Quite probably I did something screwy but I don't know what.

Thanks for the url, I'll look at it and see if I can get it working.

I'd login via Lish and see if the OOM killer killed sshd.

-Chris

The problem most likely occurs during linking of glibc - my L64 only just manages it. You need 256 MiB of swap to avoid having the OOM killer activate.

Even on the CFQ-TS patched hosts, there must be some penalty for excessive swapping. If a Linode that is busy swapping is made to wait for disk i/o during swap, it looks as if the VM system eventually freaks out and behaves as if it has run out of memory.