Re: pre-compiled kernels

looking at this suggestion its a good idea.

but part of gentoo is that we can custom compile our kernel for whatever 
reason and in whatever way, but creating a kernel that is a workhorse 
that will boot on just about any hardware configuration you can think of 
as a failsafe is an excellent idea. on the machine im on currently i 
have my origonal 2.4.something kernel, then i have a new kernel that is 
my main kernel there as well. and i have lilo configured to be able to 
boot both. that way you can build the new hotness for your machine and 
have a backup in case you compiled a little off that is 98% likely to 
boot and give you access to your box to find out what happened fix it 
and have a production environment that will run.

Andrew Gaffney wrote:

> As much as I dislike the idea, I think we should provide a 
> pre-compiled genkernel kernel on the new universal LiveCD. Before I 
> start getting flamed, hear me out.
>
> I just spent 2 hours waiting for genkernel to build a 2.4.28 kernel in 
> vmware on an Athlon 1.3GHz w/192MB RAM allocated to the virtual 
> machine...only to have it fail. Up until the kernel compile, the 
> stage3 install took ~6 minutes from a blank disk.
>
> Most people who use genkernel use the default config. In the current 
> version of the installer, the only kernel options are genkernel and 
> building a kernel from a .config that the user provides. If the user 
> can't do 'genkernel --menuconfig', then they can't change anything 
> from the default config. Why make them sit through the compilation 
> when the output would be identical to a pre-compiled binary?
>
> I myself would never use this feature, but I'm sure a lot of people 
> would appreciate it. A genkernel generated kernel is one step away 
> from a binary distro's provided kernel. Why not take that extra baby 
> step to make a few lazy users happy?
>