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notes/gentoo/current.md
tomit4 2b82fbd024 📝 Made notes on current work in gentoo
2025-12-11 23:12:24 -08:00

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Current Tasks

Brief Intro

This document ins solely here as a sort of note to my future self regarding various Gentoo related things I'm working on.

Kernel 6.18

I've downloaded Kernel 6.18 and it's giving us a few issues. First and foremost the gentoo kernel devs have turned off iptables in the kernel by default, forcing us to choose between the xtables-legacy-multi or xtables-nft-multi via eselect:

eselect tables list

On the old kernel (6.12), we want to stay on 1, as it allows ufw/iptables to just work out of the box. On the new kernel (6.18), we want to switch this profile as it allows docker to run (sort of, see below), but ufw outright will not work as it relies on iptables.

What this means in essence is we have to convert over to nftables, which I've successfully tested is, while certainly more involved than ufw, is not that difficult.

Gentoo Wiki's nftables entry

You may also want to review the Gentoo Wiki's iptables entry.

Now, the issue still remains that docker also breaks because it heavily depends on iptables, and nftables support is experimental as of version 29, a version that Gentoo currently does not have in its repos.

I have found evidence that there is a compatibility layer between iptables and nftables which some have gotten to work on Debian called iptables-compat. I have enabled a USE flag on nftables called xtables which supposedly tries to address this compatibility. I have not yet tested this on kernel 6.18, but will do so when we have time.

Zen Kernel 6.18

This all came about while learning about Gentoo Kernel compilation for the first time, and while I have gotten a version of 6.12 working, 6.12.59 specifically. While stable, I am more used to the bleeding edge of Artix Linux and would like to have the Zen Kernel patches applied. The Zen Kernel via the Gentoo repos is only within the last few versions and that is why I started playing around with this.

In short, get the regular 6.18 kernel working, save the .config, redownload the zen kernel, apply this config and run make olddefconfig and you should not have these incompatibility issues. See updating.md for details on how to upgrade to the zen kernel once you have the regular kernel compiled and working.