Installing on MSI GT72S-G220 Gaming Laptop

[statikregimen]

Hello,

I thought it may be useful to someone in the future, to share my experience installing to this laptop. This is sort of an unorganized/non-linear stream of information, so before you begin, please give it a good once-over, and skim the README.md and NOTES.md in the git repo and wiki page (linked below), for more detailed/updated information.

Resources:
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/MSI_GT72S-G220 - Gentoo Wiki Page
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1067924.html - Getting the framebuffer working; not really specific to this laptop probably but kergen wanted Nvidia FB support which apparently doesn't work.
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-8108726.html - Again, not really specific to this laptop, but it helped nonetheless.
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1068184.html - Kernel needs Realtek HD codec support and XDM (or another displaymanager) seems to go a long way in getting your session singing nicely so pulseaudio is happy.
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1072464.html - This is my biggest ongoing issue with this machine, but it's probably not a huge deal to most users

Wifi:
You will need sys-kernel/linux-firmware for the wifi adapter.

CPU:
This is probably pretty important regarding the CPU microcode, and I was able to work out how to do it pretty easily based on these:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-8112768.html#8112768
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Intel_microcode

Kernel:
I created my kernel config using a Pappy Preconfig and kergen. I will be maintaining and sharing a configuration for this laptop here:
https://bitbucket.org/experimentfailed/gentoo-kernel-configs - Please review NOTES.md under this laptop's directory for even more information (and more updated).

In addition to kergen and the changes from the threads above, I had to select PS/2 Mouse and NVM, as kergen didn't pick up on them. This is, of course, already done in the configuration linked above.

Disks:
Note: This is just how I did it - none of this is required for installing to this laptop. You can create whatever disk/partition layout works best for you.

This laptop has two 128GB SSDs. I created 2 raid volumes on each disk, from which I created 2 128GB RAID0 arrays. On one array, is my root partition. On the other, a writeback bcache for the 1tb mechanical drive, mounted to /home. Holy throughput batman!

If you have a better suggestion for an even FASTER setup, let me know!!

Note: If you do a RAID setup like mine where the root partition is on the array, you'll need an initramfs. In my case, after building my kernel with the above configuration, I used