Gentoo on ARM

One day, I was using my M1 mac (yes, I'm a soydev) to look at the gentoo docs for fun. I wanted to try and install gentoo on an ARM VM using UTM, but when I looked at the handbook, it was empty. I then just abandoned the idea and installed it instead on an x86_64 VM. But I wanted to come back to it, because it was a cool project, and see if I could do it.

First off, you should use the AMD64 handbook for most of the proccess. This post will mainly cover the differences and what tweaks you have to do rather than a full handbook.

You probably shouldn't do this on real hardware, and good luck if you're trying to use real hardware or you want graphics.

Just use the arm64 iso. Gentoo does support arm64, it's just the install guide is missing. This means that (at least some) packages will compile on arm64.

Use the arm64 stage tarball, obviously. I made the mistake of using an amd64 stage tarball, and not suprisingly, it didn't work.

The gentoo install guide recommends sysklogd, but you might get an error when you try and compile it, because it isn't stable on ARM yet.

You can use the two other options listed, syslog-ng, or metalog.

For syslog-ng, you can just install it using emerge and then enable the service with openrc, like so:

rc-update add syslog-ng default

This is all assuming you want a system logger, because you don't actually need one. If you go the systemd route, you don't need to do any of this, because systemd forces apon you uses it's own logger.

Note: I will not cover MBR booting, because I don't feel like it. This is suprisingly simple, just specify to GRUB you're using arm64:

echo 'GRUB_PLATFORMS="efi-64"' >> /etc/portage/make.conf
emerge --ask sys-boot/grub
grub-install --target=arm64-efi --efi-directory=/boot
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

and you're done!

The primary reason you might run into issues with this guide is the same reason there isn't an official one: ARM devices vary wildly, and you are bound to run into issues with a single one-size-fits-all guide.

But, this guide does work on UTM when I tested it, so take that as you will.

Gentoo is an awesome distro, and is very unique in it's customizability, and I would recommend to every computer nerd to give it a go.