Here we are for the fourth part of the Gentoo vServer setup series. I reached chapter 7 of the Gentoo install guide, "Configuring the Kernel". As already mentioned in the last article I'm going to use the hardened sources because they contain some patches which will make the server more secure (and I think should be available/enabled in all kernel sources by default). You can have a look at the page of the Gentoo hardened project for more information about it.

This is the third part of a series of articles. Go to the first or second article

While the way through the first chapters of the installation manual were quite easy, I was facing the first problem at the end of chapter 5. I needed to find out what CFLAGS I'm going to set for the server. Well, there's a link to the gcc optimization documentation and it tells you to look into /proc/cpuinfo. I found the following there:

root@rescue ~ # cat /proc/cpuinfo 
processor	: 0
vendor_id	: GenuineIntel
cpu family	: 6
model		: 2
model name	: QEMU Virtual CPU version 0.13.0
stepping	: 3
cpu MHz		: 2806.926
cache size	: 4096 KB
fpu		: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid level	: 4
wp		: yes
flags		: fpu de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx 
                  lm up rep_good pni cx16 hypervisor lahf_lm
bogomips	: 5613.85
clflush size	: 64
cache_alignment	: 64
address sizes	: 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

Yeah, it's a Genuine Intel processor named "QEMU Virtual CPU", how enlightening. So I went looking in the whole wide internet and after some research I stumbled upon the Gentoo Wiki. I almost forgot about it in the past as they had the hard disk crash and needed quite so time to recover. There I found an article about safe CFLAGS and the other one listing safe CFLAGS for Intel. They recommend using -march=native as the compiler then decides what features to enable. If you really wanna know what flags gcc is using you can execute gcc -Q --help=target -march=native and have a look at the output. I don't need this server as a distcc host so I used -march=native and went on. MAKEOPTS was the easier part. My vServer only offers on CPU so -j2 will be fine.

This is the second part of a series of articles. Read the first article here. 

When purchasing a vServer account with Hetzner you'll have the choice of several OS images. Since I want to install Gentoo, which is not officially supported, the next step is to boot the rescue system (you can actually choose an option to not install any OS image and boot right into the rescue system).

First thing after starting the vServer I started the remote console and logged into the rescue system. Using passwd I set the new password and was able to connect via SSH to my new vServer. You can also work with the remote console but this can be a pain as I haven't found a way to enter a pipe and it's nicer to work in a known environment in your favourite terminal.

My current VServer is located at a hoster that uses Xen. Since I had some serious problems with this virtualization technique, I will switch to a KVM based VServer based on Gentoo. While preparing for the migration I found just little information about how to start and where to gather all the neccessary information to get started with a KVM hosted Gentoo guest. So I decided to blog about it so I will remember and everyone else in the whole wide internet can profit from it (Flattr's welcome )