Handbook Talk:Parts/Installation/Kernel

Installing the source
typo in root #emerge --ask sys-kernel


 * This is intentional on the Handbook Talk:Parts/Installation/Kernel. In the architecture specific articles it's fixed. (see Handbook:AMD64/Installation/Kernel for an example. --Maffblaster (talk) 20:35, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

Default: Manual configuration
With pciutils emerged you can run At the bottom of the verbose output it will explicitly tell you which Kernel driver is in use.


 * Thanks! Using works even better. Please do not forget to add a signature when posting on talk pages. :) --Maffblaster (talk) 20:38, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

HID support
The kernel module mentioned in the handbook has changed place and title in the new kernel.


 * In case of such changes will you please mention the kernel version as in the older versions it's definitely not changed. --Charles17 (talk) 12:11, 18 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Version 4.4.4, the version that is automatically pulled if you do a clean install now. --Switch87 (talk) 12:27, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

EFI stub
In order to boot directly from UEFI, the kernel needs to have  support enabled:

UEFI does not pass kernel parameters to the kernel during normal boot, so they must be hardcoded them via. to boot a root partition located at input the following text in the kernel configuration:

For GPT systems, using  might be preferable. To find out use :

If this is ever integrated, I would add a note that it is not preferred because Stub's parameters are not easily modified for debugging/troubleshooting. You would have to rebuild the kernel to add/change any boot parameters. --Grknight (talk) 02:03, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

Make note about genkernel's disk space usage?
The binaries compiled by genkernel can take a lot of disk space - I was walking a friend through installing Gentoo on a VM, and recommended genkernel as the best method for starting out. Turns out that the compilation took up about 6GB of space in, and although they had given the VM enough space for it to complete, I needed to tell them to 'make clean' the compiled genkernel binaries after compilation to get enough space back to continue the installation.

I'd suggest changing paragraph T:60:

"Now, compile the kernel sources by running . Be aware though, as compiles a kernel that supports almost all hardware, this compilation will take quite a while to finish!"

to:

"Now, compile the kernel sources by running . Be aware though, as compiles a kernel that supports almost all hardware, this compilation will take quite a while to finish, and use several times more space than a regular compile - it can easily use up 6GB of space in total, which is not automatically cleaned afterwards!"

or words similar to that effect. --Sophira (talk) 21:46, 17 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Hi Sophira, it's nice to see that you're helping your friend use Gentoo. What you said it not really accurate, unfortunately does not support building kernels that support all hardware. It only builds a very vanilla binary kernel with a minimal subsystem support. It does not perform any kind of hardware detection or create a custom kernel configuration file. In response to this common misconception I've included a special paragraph near the front of the genkernel article.


 * If anything it would be better to provide to provide a link to the genkernel article and Kernel/Removal. I'll think about what's best to do here. Thanks for the tip! --Maffblaster (talk) 20:32, 18 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Hiya Maffblaster! Thanks for the reply.


 * I'm a bit confused about why your response directly contradicts the installation guide. Take a look at the page and you'll see that it does actually say "...as compiles a kernel that supports almost all hardware...". It's probably not really surprising that it's a common misconception if the installation guide is saying exactly that!


 * Note that I'm not suggesting that genkernel creates a custom kernel for your configuration. I'm saying that it tries to support all hardware in the same kernel, which is why it takes so long.


 * If it doesn't try to support all hardware, as you suggest (or at least all commonly-used hardware), then why does the compilation use up about 4x the space of a regular kernel compile and take much longer? I'm a bit confused.


 * Thanks. --Sophira (talk) 21:09, 18 August 2016 (UTC)