Following the Arch wiki, I built a custom kernel for the first time ever. It was easier that I thought it’d be, probably because the Arch wiki is so thorough and because I didn’t make that many changes… I just enabled a few FireWire related options as per this guide in order to work on this project (or this).
Results/takeaways
- The OS ran fine with the new kernel 💃
- I learned how to manually create GRUB entries 🔧
- I learned that I don’t even have to create new GRUB entries, since I can simply point to the new kernel image and initramfs from the bootloader menu 🪛
- I learned that my 5800X3D runs well (compiles the new kernel blazingly fast) with all cores set to negative 30 in the UEFI
- FireWire is dead 💀
Tiny followup on that project
That old GPU did something to the UEFI (possibly CMOS?), because even after removing all potentially incompatible hardware and reinstalling my modern GPU, I still got that same error message, saying that the system was forces to boot in CSM mode. Only by resetting the UEFI settings was I able to restore the system to a working state. I admit, I panicked.
Congrats!.. now do the whole system. 😁
Sorry for the late response!
Oh NO 🤣 I did successully install Gentoo once and I see the benefits. I really do. BUT. My brain works in such a way, that I need to understand every single USE flag, otherwise I “can’t” install packages 😭 I simply can’t allow myself to do a… “as is” installation with Gentoo… And I don’t have to motivation right now to learn EVERYTHING I’d have to learn xD
Sorry, short answer: yes, later xD
You could also recompile your arch packages.
Cool! I never thought of that! How would you do it? Go to the Arch packages website, download the source tarballs and use
make?Nah, it’s way easier. You can use makepkg and the Arch Build System.
Oh, well that I was doing with Librewolf all the time before it was made available in the official repo. :) Thanks!
gentoo taught me how to recompile and it feels like arch takes that thunder sometimes. lol
In times of pre-optimized repos (like CachyOS) it seems rather redundant from a performance perspective. Other reasons remain valid though (learning or specialized optimizations or requirements).
Alternatively, it can also be considered wasteful (electricity/compute) when everyone compiles their whole system instead of doing it once in a central server.