Yep, vanilla is the flavor of the kernel for me. I like using vanilla in #funtoo. It is nice and it is simple. No patches. No security watch-cha-ma-call-it or anything like that. Just me and that good 'ol penguin; which deals with my hardware, networking and you-name-it systems.
I like tailoring my kernel to my needs. Ran the glorious:
localmodconfig
With all my stuff plugged in and turned on. Also, I took the time of browsing the interesting parts of my kernel; checking out the help and all to see if I want those features or not. Specially on my networking section!
Anyway, that hard work is only done a few times (yep, I missed a lot of things the first time). It is fun and, after a while, you end up with a slim kernel that works fine for you.
All this said, I just wanna say: thank you, bitches! To the genkernel-next team. They're doing great work while enabling me to use btrfs and virtio on my kernel by simplifying the insertion of these modules into my initrd. All I do when I get a kernel src upgrade is:
genkernel --virtio --btrfs --busybox --oldconfig --menuconfig --kernel-config=/etc/kernels/kernel-config-x86_64-3.18.<revision -minus-1> all
boot-update
Or, what I just did to install 3.18.6:
genkernel --virtio --btrfs --busybox --oldconfig --menuconfig --kernel-config=/etc/kernels/kernel-config-x86_64-3.18.5 all
boot-update
Funtoo stores my kernel configs in /etc/kernels. This is convenient and genkernel helps me re-build my kernel, taking care of the old configuration and giving me the menuconfig to decide if I wanna tweak it some more or not.
Quite honestly, I don't think --oldconfig is doing much here. It doesn't ever ask me what I wanna do with the new stuff. It is supposed to have sane defaults. Maybe I am missing something. If anybody wants to clarify this, I am all eyes.
Oh well, I hope you got an idea of how to maintain your own vanilla kernel config with genkernel-next and Funtoo.