With an ever increasing userbase demanding a higher quality of stable, production-ready kernel sources and featureful desktop support the professionalism and staffing of the kernel project is very important. Because we as users want the best from Gentoo Linux we supply a selection of both generic and specialised sources capable of handling the day-to-day grind to make life a little easier.
In order to provide a rich choice of high quality kernel trees Gentoo Linux must apply, write and test several kernel patches to the official upstream releases before they can offer finished ebuilds to the users. This is where the Gentoo Kernel project comes into play.
The Gentoo Kernel Project aims to deliver the best possible experience from its sources across all supported architectures. By maintaining quality control, clearly defined road maps, highly skilled developers and a standard base across all of our kernels the project will help bring the end-user experience of our kernels to even higher levels.
| Developer | Nickname | Role |
| Daniel Drake | dsd | Lead ( Kernel Lead and misc. other things. ) |
| Tony Vroon | chainsaw | Member ( mm-sources, vanilla-sources ) |
| Daniel Gryniewicz | dang | Member ( User Mode Linux ) |
| Guy Martin | gmsoft | Member ( hppa-sources ) |
| Greg Kroah-Hartman | gregkh | Member ( git-sources, gentoo-sources, udev, hotplug etc. ) |
| Markos Chandras | hwoarang | Member ( gentoo-sources, genpatches ) |
| Christian Birchinger | joker | Member ( sparc-sources ) |
| Joshua Kinard | kumba | Member ( mips-sources ) |
| Michael Marineau | marineam | Member ( ck-sources ) |
| Maarten Bressers | mbres | Member ( gentoo-sources, genpatches ) |
| Mike Pagano | mpagano | Member ( gentoo-sources, genpatches ) |
| Krzysiek Pawlik | nelchael | Member ( tuxonice-sources ) |
| Michael Januszewski | spock | Member ( vesafb-tng, gensplash and splashutils ) |
All developers can be reached by e-mail using nickname@gentoo.org.
The kernel project has the following subprojects:
| Project | Lead | Description |
| gentoo-sources | Daniel Drake | Full sources including the Gentoo patchset for the 2.6 kernel tree. [2.6] |
| hppa-sources | Guy Martin | Gentoo Kernel supporting pa-risc processors. [2.6] |
| mips-sources | Joshua Kinard | Gentoo Kernel based from the 2.4 branch supporting MIPS processors [2.4/2.6] |
| sparc-sources | Christian Birchinger | Gentoo Kernel supporting SPARC processors [2.4] |
The Gentoo Kernel herd maintains the following list of kernels currently in portage. Additional kernels in portage that are not listed below are not maintained under the kernel herd.
| Kernel | Description |
| ck-sources | Con Kolivas' kernel sources. |
| git-sources | git sources, the absolute latest kernel available. |
| hardened-sources | Sources based upon genpatches-base along with the grsecurity patch which includes Pax. |
| mm-sources | Andrew Morton's patchset for 2.6 consisting of experimental features, cleanups, and other interesting patches. |
| sh-sources | SuperH sources including the gentoo patchset. |
| suspend2-sources | Software Suspend 2 source and the Gentoo patchset. |
| tuxonice-sources | TuxOnIce (formerly Suspend2) sources and the Gentoo patchset. |
| usermode-sources | Full sources for the User Mode Linux kernel. |
| vanilla-sources | Full prepatched/rc sources for the Linux kernel. |
| xbox-sources | Full sources for the Xbox Linux kernel. |
The kernel project maintains the following herds:
| Herd | Members | Description |
| kernel | armin76, asn, chainsaw, dang, dsd, genstef, gregkh, hollow, marineam, mpagano, nelchael, spock | Core kernels stuff |
| kernel-misc | dsd, genstef, robbat2, solar | Kernel related packages |
Many kernels in Gentoo include part or all of the genpatches patchset. genpatches is focused on being a minimal patchset mostly focused on bugfixes, with minimal deviation from the upstream Linux kernel.
The genpatches homepage can be found at http://dev.gentoo.org/~dsd/genpatches.
In order to encourage new contributors, we have documented the procedures used when maintaining gentoo-sources-2.6. The document can be found here.
The Gentoo Kernel Mailing List is a public mailing list for the discussion of project related topics and release announcements for genpatches, vesafb-tng and fbsplash.
Gentoo maintains a a full listing of all public Gentoo Mailing Lists as well as information on how to subscribe and unsubscribe.