To take control over the exact version that is installed of important packages that are installed in the compat layer when performing the Prefix bootstrap, we can use a package.mask file; see https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AMD64/Full/Portage#Masked_packages.
This could be important for glibc for example, since using the bleeding-edge version of glibc could cause problems in the software layer, we should probably be a bit more conservative there.
There are known problems with glibc 2.34 (current latest) and the combination of CUDA and GCC 11.x, for example (@amadio: any references on that)?