I’m excited to share that I’ve successfully installed Gentoo Linux (arm64) on my Banana Pi M4 Zero, running the latest kernel (Linux 6.6.72-current-sunxi64). To make this work, I borrowed the firmware, kernel, bootloader, and modules from Armbian’s rolling release. Huge thanks to the developers at LeMaker/Armbian for their fantastic work!
Installing Gentoo on this board was an amazing experience, especially because it has a little eMMC and uses a single partition for both root and boot, which simplifies things significantly. I’ve noticed that emerging packages takes noticeably less time compared to my Raspberry Pi 3. Enabling binhost in make.conf made the process even smoother!
I’ve equipped the system with useful tools like chrony, screen, htop, neofetch, lighttpd, and pip3, and even installed heavy libraries like pychromecast and tuya-connector-python via pip. Currently, it’s hosting a dozen home automation services and is running rock-solid—it hasn’t missed a beat!
Gentoo on this board has been a fantastic adventure so far. Looking forward to experimenting with it even more!
Finally, here is a screenshot of my terminal.
