how to use eapi 8 and install the latest packages in Gentoo

[rupeshforu3]

Hi I am Rupesh and I am from India and I brought a new system with AMD Ryzen zen3 5500GT and Asus prime b450 motherboard. I installed Gentoo Linux on my system and it is working fine but I can't install the latest version of packages.

With your valuable suggestions I have installed Gentoo Linux on my system but I have not modified the configuration files related to portage and so I think that newer version of packages are not installed.

The latest version of zen kernel is 6.12.1 which is in eapi 8 repository. But I have installed Zen kernel 6.10 40 days back. At present when I search for the word kernel using the following command

emerge -S kernel

I got result as

Zen kernel
Installed version 6.10
Available version 6.10

I think that that at present my system is using eapi 6 or eapi 7.

Kindly try to suggest how to use eapi 8 as default so that I can install latest version of packages.

Also can you say whether it is needed to install Gentoo Linux from the beginning.
_________________
Regards,
Rupesh.

[grknight]

This is not a user concern beyond keeping the package manager, which is sys-apps/portage in Gentoo, up to date.

EAPI is primarily a concern for developers. It is what the package manager expects to find.

A system with multiple EAPI values is very valid and expected. There is no need for action here.

[Hu]

If you want Portage to pick a specific version, you should tell it that. What is the full output of emerge --pretend --verbose '=category/package-version', for an appropriate category, package, and version? You did not show the specific package you want, so I cannot fill this in for you. "Zen kernel" is not a package, and is not something Portage should have printed. Perhaps you meant sys-kernel/zen-sources?

[rupeshforu3]

I want specifically to install the package zen-sources.

At present I am away from my system.

Can you try to suggest how to use eapi 8.
_________________
Regards,
Rupesh.

[GDH-gentoo]

Gentoo's official repository hasn't packaged Zen kernel 6.12.1. I suppose that what you saw was a third party repository that packages it (maybe the kzd one?). If yes, then read here how to enable additional ebuild repositories.
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[rupeshforu3]

See the following page

https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/sys-kernel/zen-sources

It consists of the following sentence

It seems that version 6.12.1.zen1 is available upstream, while the latest version in the Gentoo tree is 6.10.10.
_________________
Regards,
Rupesh.

[asturm]

Yes. Upstream for zen-sources is https://github.com/zen-kernel which is *not* Gentoo.

[GDH-gentoo]

And Gentoo doesn't package that version, so you won't be able to install it with emerge. At least not from the official repository. And this has nothing to do with EAPI.
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[rupeshforu3]

Ok may I know when the zen kernel version 6.12.1 is going to be available to public.

I think that zen kernel in Gentoo is too old. Latest kernel 6.12.1 consists of various improvements.
_________________
Regards,
Rupesh.

[pietinger]

At the moment only the gentoo-sources are available in version 6.12.1; even our distribution kernel is still on 6.11.10. Probably because we don't have the new linux-headers yet. Normally these will also be upgraded to 6.12 in a few days. I would wait until then (I'm still running gentoo-sources 6.11.10 myself).

[nox23]

I manually fetch a git repo of xanmod sources. I think you can do the same for the zen sources.
I do as follow :

1. Init and clone the repo

[rupeshforu3]

Linux kernel which is not related to zen is updated frequently. At present it is at 6.11.10.

From the past two months zen kernel is at 6.10.10 and even version greater than 6.11.1 is not yet released to public.
_________________
Regards,
Rupesh.

[Hu]

From a quick review of the gentoo.git history, it looks like anarchy@ is the most frequent committer to update zen-sources ebuilds for new versions. It also looks like anarchy@'s most recent activity is in September, for a bump of zen-sources. Therefore, if I were to speculate based only on that history, I would say that (1) you are waiting for anarchy@ to bump it (or for someone to step in on anarchy's behalf), and (2) anarchy@ has been busy with non-gentoo.git activity. I further guess then that anarchy@ is not specifically unaware of the newer versions, but simply is not doing gentoo.git work right now, and may get to zen-sources when he resumes contributing to Gentoo. A review of the relevant metadata.xml says anarchy@ is the only maintainer for this package.

I expect that the zen-sources-6.12.1 (or higher) ebuild will be available in gentoo.git soon after anarchy@ resumes contributing to gentoo.git. I make no commitments when that activity will resume.

[rupeshforu3]

Thanks for your suggestions and upto that time I will wait.
_________________
Regards,
Rupesh.

[rupeshforu3]

Hi I am using Fedora and debian along with gentoo linux. I requested in their forums to release zen kernel to public. Their reply was

There's no performance gain in using zen kernel compared to generic kernel.

Is this true.
_________________
Regards,
Rupesh.

[Hu]

The Zen kernel already is public. You can go use it right now, if you don't mind either going outside Portage or writing an ebuild for it yourself. You can use an existing ebuild as a baseline.

The statement that there is no performance gain is hard to quantify without more detail about the desired workload.