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Gentoo CJK Minimal Installation CD

A third-party amd64 minimal installation CD, built by Gentoo's Catalyst from the official Release Engineering specs. It differs from install-amd64-minimal-*.iso in three named ways only:

1. the build has the gentoo-zh overlay configured;
2. the kernel is sys-kernel/gentoo-cjk-kernel-bin, which carries the cjktty patch, so the Linux console renders CJK;
3. sys-fs/zfs is built against that kernel, so the medium can import a pool.

Everything else is upstream's: the package list, livecd/unmerge, livecd/empty, the dracut arguments and the GRUB theme.

The kernel version is derived, not written down. The medium takes the newest sys-kernel/gentoo-cjk-kernel-bin at or below what sys-fs/zfs declares in MODULES_KERNEL_MAX, so an install CD gets as much hardware support as ZFS allows. The build masks everything above that and lets portageq best_visible choose; when zfs raises the value, a newer kernel is picked with no edit. Since 2.4, sys-fs/zfs carries the module itself, so sys-fs/zfs-kmod is not used.

stage1 pulls from the official binhost, because its dependency graph is 465 packages and the long tail is LLVM and Rust, which reach it as build dependencies and are stripped again by livecd/unmerge. stage2 does not: sys-fs/zfs has to be compiled against the CJK kernel that was just installed, and a binary one is built against Gentoo's own dist-kernel. It is excluded by name as well, so the rule survives someone enabling the binhost there.

Fork

This repository is a fork of the Gentoo Release Engineering repository:

Official Repo GitWeb: https://gitweb.gentoo.org/proj/releng.git/ Read-only mirror: https://github.com/gentoo/releng

It is tracked as the upstream remote and the work sits on the gentoo-cjk branch. Upstream files are not modified. The deviation is these added paths:

releases/specs/amd64/installcd-cjk-stage1.replacements releases/specs/amd64/installcd-cjk-stage2-minimal.spec.append releases/portage/isos-cjk/ docker/ tests/

Catalyst's spec parser lets a later key replace an earlier one, so the append file is concatenated onto the official stage2 spec at build time.

The replacements file covers packages the official stage1 spec still lists that ::gentoo has masked for removal, each replaced by the package its mask comment names. The build aborts when an old atom is no longer in the spec, so a stale line cannot pass unnoticed once upstream carries the replacement itself.

Verification

install-amd64-cjk-minimal-20260829T210059Z.iso, 0.93 GiB, built by CI on 2026-08-29 and booted in KVM. tests/boot-test.py answered:

ok    kernel: 7.1.12-gentoo-cjk-dist-bin
ok    zfs: zfs-loaded
ok    zpool: no pools available to import
ok    cjk-console: CONFIG_FRAMEBUFFER_CONSOLE=y CONFIG_FONT_CJK=y CONFIG_FONT_CJK_16x16=y
ok    storage-tools: listed

A serial console carries bytes, not glyphs, so whether CJK is drawn on screen is not covered. What is established is that the font is built into the kernel and that the framebuffer console can take over.

Building

docker build -t gentoo-cjk-livecd -f docker/Dockerfile .
docker run --rm --privileged -v /dev:/dev \
    -v "$PWD/catalyst:/var/tmp/catalyst" \
    -v "$PWD/output:/output" gentoo-cjk-livecd

The container needs --privileged and /dev because Catalyst uses loop devices and mount. STOREDIR, OUTPUT_DIR, JOBS, GENTOO_ZH_URI and AUTOBUILDS_URI are the environment variables the build script reads.

build-installcd.sh preflight resolves both package lists with emerge --pretend in about two minutes, without building anything. A full build needs loop and squashfs for the tree snapshot; dependency resolution does not.

The entrypoint takes preflight, stage1, stage2 or all, and defaults to all. The workflow in .github/workflows/build-installcd.yml runs the stages as separate jobs, each with its own six-hour budget. It passes the storedir between them, so stage2 needs the tree snapshot, the stage1 tarball and the build.env that stage1 wrote.

Credits

This repository forks the Gentoo Release Engineering repository, which hosts the build specs. Building them requires Gentoo's Catalyst.

Official Repo GitWeb: https://gitweb.gentoo.org/proj/releng.git/ Read-only mirror: https://github.com/gentoo/releng

https://github.com/zozx/gentoo-cjk-livecd demonstrated that a CJK install CD can be built this way, and identified the packages that need extra package.use entries.

The cjktty patch and sys-kernel/gentoo-cjk-kernel-bin come from https://github.com/gentoo-zh/overlay and https://github.com/gentoo-zh/cjktty-patches.