Hello to whomever reads this blog and welcome to Gentoo!
I was craving this distro for a long time, but I just couldn't install it . After so many trial and deadly errors inside a test VM, I finally was able to muster the courage needed to actually replace my 2.5 years old Arch VMs host with Gentoo .
Why Gentoo ?
Gentoo is hard for an Arch user, it takes a LOT longer to deploy, and dependencies conflicts are a huge turn off .
BUT, I wanted something more minimal than Arch . Pacman is awesome, but each package's deps are set in stone (PKGBUILDs) and it gets rather boring to edit these whenever you upgrade said package . Let's take Qemu package for example : I run this server entirely headless, it doesn't even have a GPU attached to the main OS (I'm passing all of them to different VMs) . Qemu pulls all kinds of X.org deps, which I obviously don't need and the same is true for Screenfetch too . In Gentoo I just put "-X" in USE flags and never be worried about X deps poisoning my headless pristine machine .
I used Arch ISO to build Gentoo, because it provides an excellent environment for UEFI out of the box . I did this while fasting, and with the lab's lights turned off to build the atmosphere for this scary jump.
This time, I read the Handbook for AMD64 and built my cheat sheet on top of it . Watching GCC codes flying on the screen while getting my 5820k raped with -j13 was satisfying .
The initial "emerge -auND --with-bdeps=y 
Porting my rc scripts from systemd to OpenRC was a challenge too, setting up the network was the hardest part because it NEEDS to be set inside OpenRC's networking stack (I used to call ip commands to set up my network manually) otherwise Samba won't start .
Finally got to install Qemu-9999 (Gentoo's way of saying VCS) and found a OVMF-9999 ebuild which was outdated, updated it and put it inside a local portage tree and it worked after a little bit of messing around . VFIO needed to be built statically inside the kernel because genkernel can't load it first at boot not matter what I would do . Its arguments are passed directly through the UEFI bootloader (Gummiboot! YEAH) .
Anyway, I think I love Gentoo, and I see myself never returning to Arch . Let's just hope that no updates would screw my system down this path .
My current /etc/portage/make.conf
CFLAGS="-march=native -mtune=native -O2 -pipe"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"
MAKEFLAGS="-j6"
CHOST="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu"
USE="bindist bash-completion symlink avx2 acl python -debug -X -gtk -gtk2 -gtk3 -qt -qt4 -qt5"
PORTDIR="/usr/portage"
DISTDIR="/usr/src"
PKGDIR="${PORTDIR}/packages"
PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/tmp"
GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://gentoo.prz.rzeszow.pl"
FEATURES="candy"
ACCEPT_LICENSE=""
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64"
PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/portage"
#EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="--ask"
#ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="*"
/etc/portage/package.accept_keywords
sys-boot/gummiboot
=app-emulation/qemu-9999 **
=sys-kernel/spl-9999 **
=sys-fs/zfs-9999 **
=sys-fs/zfs-kmod-9999 **
=sys-devel/llvm-9999 **
sys-devel/bc **
sys-kernel/git-sources **
sys-fs/mdadm **
sys-fs/xfsprogs **
/etc/portage/package.use
app-emulation/qemu ** -python -jpeg -png usbredir usb libusb
=dev-lang/python-2.7.11-r2:2.7 sqlite
Here is my contribution to this distro, an up-to-date OVMF-9999 ebuild :
EAPI=5
inherit eutils multiprocessing toolchain-funcs
DESCRIPTION="EDK II Open Source UEFI Firmware"
HOMEPAGE="http://tianocore.sourceforge.net"
LICENSE="BSD-2"
SLOT="0"
IUSE="debug +qemu +secure-boot +python_single_target_python2_7"
EGIT_REPO_URI="git://github.com/tianocore/edk2.git"
inherit git-2
KEYWORDS="-* ~amd64"
OPENSSL_PV="1.0.2g"
OPENSSL_P="openssl-${OPENSSL_PV}"
SRC_URI+=" mirror://openssl/source/${OPENSSL_P}.tar.gz"
DEPEND=">=dev-lang/nasm-2.0.7
sys-power/iasl
=dev-lang/python-2.7*[sqlite(+)]"
RDEPEND="qemu? ( app-emulation/qemu )"
src_prepare() {
if gcc-specs-pie; then
epatch "${FILESDIR}/edk2-nopie.patch"
fi
if use secure-boot; then
local openssllib="${S}/CryptoPkg/Library/OpensslLib"
mv "${WORKDIR}/${OPENSSL_P}" "${openssllib}" || die
cd "${openssllib}/${OPENSSL_P}"
epatch "${openssllib}/EDKII_${OPENSSL_P}.patch"
cd "${openssllib}"
sh -e ./Install.sh || die
cd "${S}"
fi
}
src_configure() {
./edksetup.sh || die
TARGET_NAME=$(usex debug DEBUG RELEASE)
TARGET_TOOLS="GCC49"
case $ARCH in
amd64) TARGET_ARCH=X64 ;;
#x86) TARGET_ARCH=IA32 ;;
*) die "Unsupported $ARCH" ;;
esac
}
src_compile() {
emake ARCH=${TARGET_ARCH} -C BaseTools -j1
./OvmfPkg/build.sh
-a "${TARGET_ARCH}"
-b "${TARGET_NAME}"
-t "${TARGET_TOOLS}"
-n $(makeopts_jobs)
-D SECURE_BOOT_ENABLE=$(usex secure-boot TRUE FALSE)
-D FD_SIZE_2MB
|| die "OvmfPkg/build.sh failed"
}
src_install() {
local fv="Build/OvmfX64/${TARGET_NAME}_${TARGET_TOOLS}/FV"
insinto /usr/share/${PN}/x64/
newins ${fv}/OVMF.fd ovmf_x64.bin
newins ${fv}/OVMF_CODE.fd ovmf_code_x64.bin
newins ${fv}/OVMF_VARS.fd ovmf_vars_x64.bin
}
It compiles amd64 binaries only as I don't need IA32 on my machine and install both unified OVMF as well as split CODE+VARS inside /usr/share/ovmf/x64/
My Gentoo's installation cheat sheet :
date MMDDhhmmYYYY
cd /mnt/
tar xvjpf stage3-*.tar.bz2 --xattrs
nano /mnt/etc/portage/make.conf
nano /mnt/etc/resolv.conf
mount -t proc proc /mnt/proc
mount --rbind /sys /mnt/sys
mount --make-rslave /mnt/sys
mount --rbind /dev /mnt/dev
mount --make-rslave /mnt/dev
chmod 1777 /dev/shm
chroot /mnt /bin/bash
source /etc/profile
export PS1="(CHROOT) $PS1"
emerge-webrsync
emerge --sync
nano /etc/locale.gen
locale-gen
eselect locale list
eselect locale set X
env-update && source /etc/profile && export PS1="(CHROOT) $PS1"
emerge --ask --update --deep --newuse --with-bdeps=y
perl-cleaner reallyall
echo "Asia/Riyadh" > /etc/timezone
emerge --config sys-libs/timezone-data
emerge --ask sys-kernel/git-sources
emerge --ask sys-kernel/genkernel
nano /mnt/etc/fstab
genkernel --menuconfig all (ACTIVATE VFIO, VIRTIO, VHOST, BRIDGE, UNIVERSAL TUN/TAP support inside the kernel "*")
CD TO /boot AND RENAME THE KERNEL TO vmlinuz AND THE INITRAMFS TO initramfs.img
nano /etc/conf.d/hostname
nano /mnt/etc/conf.d/net
ln -s /etc/init.d/net.lo /etc/init.d/net.eth0
rc-update add net.eth0 default
passwd
emerge dcron
rc-update add dcron default
crontab /etc/crontab
DON'T FORGET TO POPULATE THE CRONTAB!
rc-update add sshd default
emerge -a e2fsprogs xfsprogs dosfstools btrfs-progs bridge-utils dhcpcd
emerge --ask sys-boot/gummiboot
gummiboot install
nano /mnt/boot/loader/loader.conf
nano /mnt/boot/loader/entries/gentoo.conf
exit
cd
umount -l /mnt/dev{/shm,/pts,}
umount /mnt{/boot,/sys,/proc,}
reboot
Please do NOT run these commands automatically, these were meant as a quick referance of the steps detailed in the Handbook .
Regards .
