Gentoo Developers Exploring The Possibility Of Shipping Distribution Binary Kernels

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Gentoo Developers Exploring The Possibility Of Shipping Distribution Binary Kernels

While much of the lure to Gentoo Linux is on being a source-based distribution and assembling your system packages from source, some Gentoo developers are toying with the idea of providing some new kernel binary options similar to that of the more conventional binary Linux distributions...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Gentoo-Distro-Binary-Kernels-20

[ATrigger]

>Михаил Коляда
What a great usage of Russian, comrade.

[Michael]

>Михаил Коляда
What a great usage of Russian, comrade.

Моя жена родилась в России

[gilboa]

While I admire Gentoo's persistence in shipping source only packages, this step was long over due.
The kernel has gotten so massively complicated and the list of supported hardware has gotten so big that its no longer possible to simply flip a couple of random flags and get a bootable system unless you *know* what you are doing.

Fun (and semi unrelated) fact: in the last ten years I knew at least a dozen Gentoo users, all of them, bar none, are back to being Windows or MacOS users. On the other hand, all the Fedora, SUSE, Debian and Ubuntu users have largely remained Linux users.

[Mario Junior]

If you need a vanilla kernel binary on Gentoo, go back and install Arch.

[ElectricPrism]

Fun (and semi unrelated) fact: in the last ten years I knew at least a dozen Gentoo users, all of them, bar none, are back to being Windows or MacOS users. On the other hand, all the Fedora, SUSE, Debian and Ubuntu users have largely remained Linux users.

It was my understanding that one appeal of Gentoo development was being able to compile and program for non x86 systems more easily. So I assumed a lot of users were also app developers for Android, iOS and the likes.

If you need a vanilla kernel binary on Gentoo, go back and install Arch.

I mean it's not like you couldn't just take the Arch .tar.xz binary, decompress and dearchive it to /boot and it'd probably work right?

I think there are plenty of people who want to use Gentoo who don't care if they use a vanilla kernel or not. Having a source-based distro if the digital-apocalypse ever comes would be the best thing ever since you already have the source code for literally everything.

[ThoreauHD]

I haven't heard of a kernel dev yet that used Gentoo. Arch, yes, but that's as close as I've seen it. It's good to have both options available for Gentoo, I think. Increase ease of use while having a SHTF plan with a source compile. And yes, the kernel is getting quite large. It's only going to accelerate now that everyone and their pet monkey are making new cpu's. Even the hardware vendors can't keep up with their own stuff. Expecting a user to figure it all out is a bit much.

[yokem55]

As a long time Gentoo user who has on occasion been careless with my kernel updates, having a known working binary in my back pocket would be a godsend. And not just for non-booting kernels. I think last year the default kernel config changed to not recognize PCI USB controllers unless you explicitly enabled an option for it. So USB keyboards and mice on desktop PC's were dead until you could figure that one out in an ssh session...

[some_canuck]

gentoo is all about choice, but i think this is a dumb idea.

[elatllat]

LOL, that makes no sence; Why not just push a better defconfig? ( the kernel is one of the few things I do install from source )