the somewhat recent support for the distribution kernel packages and inclusion in the install handbook had been a positive change however as a result has revealed an partition size incompatibility with the handbook default partitioning scheme. The total combined size of gentoo-kernel-bin after installation consumes around 80MB of 128MB available allocated esp partition space recommended by the amd64 install handbook default partitioning scheme. A little simple math implies 80MB + 80 MB exceeds 128 MB thus this partition needs to be larger to accommodate that one kernel package being capable of reinstallation not failing consistently on every attempt. Initially this is not a problem however the next occasion gentoo-kernel-bin is installed the installation of that package always fails due to insufficient available partition size limitations. I enjoy spending a good amount of time assisting people learning gentoo and have observed several users experience this complication simply because the esp partition should be 512MB according to uefi boot spec however the handbook default partitioning scheme when used with gentoo-kernel-bin becomes a problem that cannot be easily resolved by novice users. This handbook disk partitioning scheme has needed some love for many years and now definitely is incompatible long term with a now widely used kernel package. I would update this myself given the ability to do so however the install handbook edits are restricted so please whoever can update the default esp size recommendation to 512MB do so asap. I've re partitioned one user's install disk over ssh to enlarge the esp partition size within the past four months and yesterday another user experienced the same complication.
To save a lot of space you can use "hostonly" with dracut: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Dracut#Adding_modules On my system a kernel + initramfs is about 17MB that way. Anyway unless you are trying to achieve a very specific configuration it's not necessary to put the kernels in the ESP, just the hundred KB or so GRUB EFI executable is sufficient.
In addition to what Michael stated, this now affects sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel and not just the -bin. When using a system built following the amd64 handbook (128M /boot partition), as of sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-5.4.94, the post install fails. This happens with only the current running kernel/initramfs within the /boot partition (no previous versions). The following output is displayed: Your configuration for sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-5.4.94 has been saved in "/etc/portage/savedconfig/sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel" for your editing pleasure. You can edit these files by hand and remerge this package with USE=savedconfig to customise the configuration. You can rename this file/directory to one of the following for its configuration to apply to multiple versions: ${PORTAGE_CONFIGROOT}/etc/portage/savedconfig/ [${CTARGET}|${CHOST}|""]/${CATEGORY}/[${PF}|${P}|${PN}] ERROR: postinst FAILED postinst: 1 Installing the kernel failed The kernel files were copied to disk successfully but the kernel was not deployed successfully. Once you resolve the problems, please run the equivalent of the following command to try again: emerge --config sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel:5.4.94 ERROR: sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-5.4.94::gentoo failed (postinst phase): Kernel install failed, please fix the problems and run emerge --config sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel:5.4.94 Call stack: ebuild.sh, line 125: Called pkg_postinst environment, line 2109: Called kernel-build_pkg_postinst environment, line 1524: Called kernel-install_pkg_postinst environment, line 1692: Called kernel-install_install_all '5.4.94' environment, line 1678: Called die The specific snippet of code: die "Kernel install failed, please fix the problems and run emerge --config ${CATEGORY}/${PN}:${SLOT}"; The only way to get 'emerge --config sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel:5.4.94' to run is to remove all the files (system-map-x.x.x, config-x.x.x, initramfs-x.x.x.img, and vmlinuz-x.x.x) [but leave the sub-directories] within /boot and then run the emerge command. To prevent this from occuring, it forced me to create a stage4 tarball, and reconfigure my partitions so that /boot is 512MB.
I submit thanks to dilfridge this has been resolved. https://dilfridge.blogspot.com/2021/03/gentoo-amd64-handbook-preparing-disks.html
