DasGregor | Gentoo Tidbits - Gentoo Has a Kernel Binary @dasgregor | Uploaded 4 years ago | Updated May 14 2024
Today I want to discuss something exciting. Gentoo has a portage package that installs the kernel as a binary. It's not marked stable, and I suggest you build this in a VM to try before testing it on your main box. However, if you do want to try it, make sure to add the following to your package.accept_keywords file:

/etc/portage/package.accept_keywords

=sys-kernel/vanilla-kernel-bin-5.4.7 ~amd64
=sys-kernel/dracut-049-r3 ~amd64
=sys-kernel/installkernel-gentoo-2 ~amd64
=sys-apps/debianutils-4.9-r1 ~amd64

I'd always say when doing this to backup your /boot directory. I did this, but everything worked for me, so this was not an issue. However, it would be good to have this for safety.

After installing, I ran this to rebuild the grub.cfg:

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

This is not a tutorial to install it, but more a discussion about source vs binary from a Gentoo user's perspective.

Resources:
https://blogs.gentoo.org/mgorny/2019/12/19/a-distribution-kernel-for-gentoo/