Gentoo

I used to think AMD’s ROCm was a nightmare to get working. I was wrong. I managed to get ROCm running in less than a day with minimal effort just by poking around on Google. Like NVIDIA, it is distribution-agnostic, even if it lacks maturity. Then I met Intel’s AI stack. My definition of “nightmare” has been officially updated. It took almost a week to get llama.cpp’s OpenVINO working on Gentoo. The software suffers from a severe case of “Ubuntunitis”—the delusional belief that Ubuntu is the only distribution in existence. This is the hallmark of companies with zero real Linux strategy. They treat Linux like Windows, showing a complete lack of willingness to learn how professional software development for the Linux actually works. ...

After my attempts to make a binhost resulted in a overcomplex mess that myself could not maintain, time for a more simplified approach: just let the hosts use emerge as usual, but delegate the heavy lifting to a more powerful machine. Enter distcc. It might be a bit slower than a perfectly tuned binhost, but it is much easier to set up. In this guide, we will walk through setting up a Gentoo client and server using OpenRC and IPv6. Please, for the love of all saints and martys, learn IPv6, let IPv4 die in peace. ...

In the previous guide, we built a dedicated binhost to compile your stuff. Time to setup your servers to consume these packages. In this follow-up guide, we will configure your servers. By pointing their Portage installations to your binhost, these machines will be able to install and update packages in minutes rather than a whole day. Prerequisites & Assumptions Shared Storage: We assume each server has access to a remote folder (via NFS, SMB, or a mounted cloud drive) at a specific mount point we will refer to as <path>. Another layer of complexity by setting in maintaining a side channel for distribution, like rsync thru ssh, is a hassle. Folder Structure: On that path, the binhost has populated <path>/<host>/binpkgs with compiled packages from the last guide and <path>/gentoo with the Portage repository tree. No Local Syncs: Because the repository is shared, these client machines are no longer supposed to run emerge --sync. They will always read the repository state managed by the binhost. The Public Key: Ensure the binhost-public.asc file (generated in Part 1) has been copied to your client server’s current working directory. All that needs to be done only once. ...

Maintaining a fleet of Gentoo systems, or struggling to compile packages on an underpowered server, can be an incredibly tedious process. Waiting hours for a single package to compile can quickly add up, and eventually you may try to burn down your home lab. Unless you rich, your home servers are likely stuff of 10 years ago made of mismatch stuff lying around. A partial solution is simple do not touching the portage flags at all and use the Gentoo provided binhost. But this presents two issues: not everything available on portage exist as binary package at their binhost mirrors, and the second is that you give away customization of the packages that you do use. ...