Happy New Year 2021! Due to the COVID pandemic, 2020 was a year unlike any other, and this has also impacted many open source projects. Nevertheless, at Gentoo we have made some great strides forward. While we now start into 2021 with fresh energy (and maybe soon antibodies), let’s also take a look back. We’re happy to share with our community the most exciting news of the past 12 months – including numbers on Gentoo activity, our new developers, and featured changes and improvements!

The Gentoo Distribution Kernel project is excited to announce that our new Linux Kernel packages are ready for a wide audience! The project aims to create a better Linux Kernel maintenance experience by providing ebuilds that can be used to configure, compile, and install a kernel entirely through the package manager as well as prebuilt binary kernels. We are currently shipping three kernel packages:

• sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel - providing a kernel with genpatches applied, built using the package manager with either a distribution default or a custom configuration
• sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-bin - prebuilt version of gentoo-kernel, saving time on compiling
• sys-kernel/vanilla-kernel - providing a vanilla (unmodified) upstream kernel

All the packages install the kernel as part of the package installation process — just like the rest of your system! More information can be found in the Gentoo Handbook and on the Distribution Kernel project page. Happy hacking!