While I have a lot of years of using Linux under my belt, I’m by no stretch of anyone’s imagination a programmer of developer so, I don’t want to put my foot in my mouth by saying no. Just looking at how the process works, my first thought is that even if possible, it would probably be too much trouble to do. The build is based on and compiled against the architecture of the system you’re running.
I would think, and again, not a programmer, that such a task would be better suited to a VM which can be configured to emulate a different architecture
Building a custom kernel is, for the most part, at least where us normal users are concerned, unnecessary, a massively inefficient waste of time, and as often as not, decrease rather than increase the efficiency of the system. Even if small - and by small, I mean tiny as best - at what cost were those gains achieved? The mere seconds saved, added together for a year, wouldn’t amount to a fraction of the time wasted compiling what usually amounts to a perceived status symbol among the purists. They can have all those games. I’m not interested.
I use the dist-kernel when installing a new system and sometimes just stick with that. I will occasionally use genkernel to check out the mainline kernel and modify it using:
genkernel --menuconfig all
where I make sure all the hid drivers are compiled into the kernel rather than loaded as modules because I have a finicky touchpad
Other than that, and that only happens when I’m bored to death, I see no advantage to using custom kernels.
What I was thinking of was if someone wanted to put Gentoo on an old 32 bit computer, it would be faster to cross compile it on a modern 64 bit machine, then transfer it. I can see that it would have to be able to run in 32 bit mode in the 64 bit machine… you cant build Gentoo without running it. So maybe your VM idea is better. I dont know how to take an install out of VM and use it for a hard install, but I think that would be feasable.
Anyway, i think for the moment, the keyword should match the architecture.
Thats what @4dandl4 tells me too.
I used genkernel for my novice attempt. That is OK… about an hour to compile kernel in my small desktop which is a core i5.
I dont think compile times are an issue with modern computers. I think learning Portage is the main thing which deters people from Gentoo today. Different story 10 years ago.
So you became less addictive with time… I think that is work related.
When there is a task to get done, any distro that works is OK.
Its when we play that taste seems to come into it.
So is Linux inherantly addictive? No , but I think maybe computers and internet are.