From: Marc Chamberlin Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2023 13:12:30 -0800 Hi - I am about to embark on a new adventure and am going to install/upgrade a new motherboard, with new processor, on-board graphics, and memory. (The old one is about 15 years old, dating back to the Pentium 2 core processor days.)  I want to keep my OpenSuSE 15.4 x64 system and all the custom application configurations as is. Is there any hiccups or other roadblocks I should prep my system for, before doing this massive hardware change-over? I just want to make this adventure go as smooth as possible and looking for advice from the schools of hard knocks! Thanks as always, in advance...    Marc.. I have popped many old openSUSE boot drives into hardware of various ages and they have all "just worked." So putting a current 15.4 boot drive into new hardware should be a breeze, since you are unlikely to have drivers that can't handle interfaces that came out after the OS release. Famous last words, of course, so I'm sure I don't need to tell you to back it up first. -- Bob Rogers http://www.rgrjr.com/

Marc Chamberlin composed on 2023-01-10 13:12 (UTC-0800):

Hi - I am about to embark on a new adventure and am going to install/upgrade a new motherboard, with new processor, on-board graphics, and memory. (The old one is about 15 years old, dating back to the Pentium 2 core processor days.)  I want to keep my OpenSuSE 15.4 x64 system and all the custom application configurations as is.

The general rule is no problems if the new motherboard is old enough. That translates roughly into 6-12 months newer OS release than hardware introduction date. That translates on 15.4 roughly into no problems for sockets LGA1200 & LGA4189 (Comet Lake, Cooper Lake, Ice Lake & Rocket Lake 4XX/5XX chipset) motherboards, possible problems for sockets LGA1700 & LGA4677 (Alder Lake 6XX chipset) motherboards, and probable problems for Raptor Lake (1700/4677 with 2022 CPUs/7XX chipsets). For Alder Lake you may need a BP kernel (from build service same kernel version TW and/or 15.5 is using) for everything to work. Without one, you may need to use nomodeset to enable booting at all, and Intel X graphics may have limitations or totally fail, especially if you have done any manual X configuration. Intel CPUs with on-chip GPU support 3 displays on motherboards providing that many outputs. My Rocket Lake has one DP and two HDMI. If currently XF86-video-intel is installed, removing it first could be a good idea, as it's generally disfavored for recent Intel graphics. You also may need newer firmware for networking, more likely for wireless than for wired. Basically, try booting your old HDD or SSD on the new motherboard, and see what happens. If you don't reach the login screen you should try again by striking the E key at the Grub menu to append plymouth=no and remove splash=silent and quiet on the end of the linu line to enable boot messages to look for clues what is happening or not. Otherwise successfully booted you'll need to modify network settings for the changed MAC addresses, and audio may need reconfiguration, but otherwise you might have a well working installation. Linux is really good with hardware switches when limited to hardware it knows about. Once you know what's needed, you'll want a fresh installation to the NVME you'll want to be using to enjoy maximum available storage performance. You could clone from the old HDD or SSD to the NVME, but I suggest you don't, to facilitate automatic use of optimal settings for the faster new environment. Logged in as root you can copy your homedir on the old disk to the new NVME location to preserve personal settings. -- Evolution as taught in public schools is, like religion, based on faith, not based on science. Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks! Felix Miata

On Wednesday 11 January 2023, Marc Chamberlin wrote:

Hi - I am about to embark on a new adventure and am going to install/upgrade a new motherboard, with new processor, on-board graphics, and memory. (The old one is about 15 years old, dating back to the Pentium 2 core processor days.)  I want to keep my OpenSuSE 15.4 x64 system and all the custom application configurations as is. Is there any hiccups or other roadblocks I should prep my system for, before doing this massive hardware change-over? I just want to make this adventure go as smooth as possible and looking for advice from the schools of hard knocks!

Thanks as always, in advance...    Marc..

I've never had any substantial issues when moving Linux boot ssd/harddrives to new systems. I did three moves as recently as last year. As others have mentioned you might need to reconfigure for changes such as a different GPU, or audio, but it should boot to where you can do all that later. As for SSD versus NVME. After moving to a Ryzen 5600 based CPU and motherboard last year, I decided to see if 250GB MVME would make much of a difference over the 250 GB SSD that I was using for root (and only root). I think I might have saved a second or two on boot, but there were no other noticeable improvements. I switched root back to SSD: no tiny screws, less handling issues, less heat concerns, no messing with the MB, which makes SSD's quick and easy to swap around, including back into 10 year old machines. SSD is a big win, a couple of years back I've moved /home to a 2TB SSD, totally worth every dollar spent. Rotating rust is now for backups only. As I understand it NVME will be of benefit if you're doing lots of chunky I/O, such as loading up a game, trawling through a database, or a disk to disk copy. I just don't do enough of that kind of thing. I've relegated the NVME to being a utility drive on /mnt/fast. I probably should have spent the NVME money on more RAM. With AMD/Ryzen it's supposedly risky to add more RAM later. The advice seems to be to replace the whole set with another. Intel is supposedly more robust due to older memory controller tech. Mysterious crashes are not something I want to deal with. Michael

Marc Chamberlin wrote:

Hi - I am about to embark on a new adventure and am going to install/upgrade a new motherboard, with new processor, on-board graphics, and memory. (The old one is about 15 years old, dating back to the Pentium 2 core processor days.)  I want to keep my OpenSuSE 15.4 x64 system and all the custom application configurations as is. Is there any hiccups or other roadblocks I should prep my system for, before doing this massive hardware change-over?

In my business, we rent a number of servers externally, I think we have a motherboard replaced about once a year. For us, the key thing is the MAC address(es) of the network interfaces in /etc/udev.d/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules. Those rules determine the naming of your network interfaces, which is often critical to everything else. AFAIR, it is usually a good idea to also rebuild the initrd.

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