Planet Gentoo

The Gentoo Big Forum Upgrade

GentooNews (https://www.gentoo.org/feeds/news.xml) — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 05:00:00 +0000

It’s taken a lot of time, but we have finally made the big step to upgrade our Gentoo Forums to phpBB3. You will notice a few differences between phpBB2 and today:

It’s definitely not Discourse.
Everyone must change their password at first login, just to freshen them up.
Reports are more private-like now, but we may get the old public reporting topic back later.

Discussion and feedback are welcome on the ‘The Gentoo Big Forum Upgrade’ discussion thread.

At the moment there are still a few know rough edges around, e.g.,

Styles may need more or less tweaks, especially the dark one.
Some BB codes are missing or/and need tweaking.
The only language available is English.

And of course new issues may still pop up. In any case, enjoy the forums!

Gentoo GNU/Hurd

GentooNews (https://www.gentoo.org/feeds/news.xml) — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 05:00:00 +0000

We are proud to announce a new port of Gentoo to GNU Hurd! Our crack team has been working hard to port Gentoo to the Hurd and can now share that they’ve succeeded, though it remains still in a heavily experimental stage. You can try Gentoo GNU/Hurd using a pre-prepared disk image. The easiest way to do this is with QEMU:

$ wget https://distfiles.gentoo.org/experimental/x86/hurd/hurd-i686-preview.qcow2.sig
$ wget https://distfiles.gentoo.org/experimental/x86/hurd/hurd-i686-preview.qcow2
$ gpg --verify hurd-i686-preview.qcow2.sig hurd-i686-preview.qcow2
$ qemu-system-i386 -drive file=hurd-i686-preview.qcow2,format=qcow2 -m 2G -net user,hostfwd=tcp:127.0.0.1:2222-:2222 -net nic,model=ne2k_pci --enable-kvm -M q35

To log in, input login root, then use gnuhurdrox as the password. Upon logging in, you can run ./setup-net.sh and /etc/init.d/sshd restart to get SSH. Connect via ssh -p 2222 root@127.0.0.1 on your host.

We have developed scripts to build this image locally and conveniently work on further development of the Hurd port. Release media like stages and automated image builds are future goals, as is feature parity on x86-64. Further contributions are welcome, encouraged, and needed. Be patient, expect to get your hands dirty, anticipate breakage, and have fun!

Oh, and Gentoo GNU/Hurd also works on real hardware!

April Fool's post

This was originally the topic of a post on April 1st. Here’s the original text for posterity…

We are proud to announce that Gentoo plans to switch to GNU Hurd as its primary kernel. Our crack team of boffins has been working hard to port Gentoo to the Hurd and can now share that that they’ve succeeded, though it remains still in a heavily experimental stage.

Linux has long been a source of unreliability. Despite the experimental status of the port, we’ve found the Hurd to be immensely more robust, and hope to be able to discontinue Linux support by the end of 2026. Previous generations of developers already attempted to port Gentoo to the Hurd, but the world was not yet ready. It is now. You can try Gentoo GNU Hurd using a pre-prepared disk image. The easiest way to do this is with QEMU: (…)

Supercharging our forums with AI

GentooNews (https://www.gentoo.org/feeds/news.xml) — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 05:00:00 +0000

This turned out to be an April Fool’s post. For the real upgrade announcement see here.

The Gentoo Forums are being upgraded for us to be able to leverage the latest in modern bleeding edge technologies. As many of you are no doubt aware, phpBB has been a challenging maintenance burden and despite years of effort, migrating to phpBB 3 has been eternally stuck. It is time to acknowledge this and find another solution. Fortunately, there is precedent from other FOSS communities that faced a similar problem.

tl;dr, we have chosen Discourse as the new forum software.

It seems doubtful that we will be able to import any of the old posts, and will likely start completely clean. However, we have been working on implementing AI features utilised via the Discourse API, which will scrape the internet for our old forums content (and more!), and post them for us in our new home. Due to this, viewing new posts will include old posts as well for the next few years or so, depending on how much of the old forums are backed up via the Internet Archive and similar archival sites. We have reasonably high hopes that many threads will appear exactly as they used to (after all, AI can only regurgitate what already existed…).

We understand that this move will be controversial, and have been working on some light themeing skins that will make it look a bit more like the classic phpbb2 of old, which hopefully should help alleviate most concern.

In Memory of Hans de Graaff

GentooNews (https://www.gentoo.org/feeds/news.xml) — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 06:00:00 +0000

We share the tragic news that Hans de Graaff (graaff), a longtime Gentoo developer, has passed away.

Hans was a dedicated member of the Gentoo community for over 20 years, near single-handedly maintaining Ruby ecosystem support. He also brought his careful attention to important security work in Gentoo in the last few years.

Kind, patient, and dedicated - we mourn the loss of a wonderful colleague.

Our deepest condolences to his family. Donations in his memory can be made for CAR T cell therapy at the LUMC Foundation.

Please join us in remembering Hans on the Gentoo forums. Details on the funeral (including an online stream) to be held on 2026-03-02 can be obtained by contacting Elvike Reitsma (elvike AT winkwaves.com).

Gentoo on Codeberg

GentooNews (https://www.gentoo.org/feeds/news.xml) — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 06:00:00 +0000

Gentoo now has a presence on Codeberg, and contributions can be submitted for the Gentoo repository mirror at https://codeberg.org/gentoo/gentoo as an alternative to GitHub. Eventually also other git repositories will become available under the Codeberg Gentoo organization. This is part of the gradual mirror migration away from GitHub, as already mentioned in the 2025 end-of-year review. Codeberg is a site based on Forgejo, maintained by a dedicated non-profit organization, and located in Berlin, Germany. Thanks to everyone who has helped make this move possible!

These mirrors are for convenience for contribution and we continue to host our own repositories, just like we did while using GitHub mirrors for ease of contribution too.

Submitting pull requests

If you wish to submit pull requests on Codeberg, it is recommended to use the AGit approach as it is more space efficient and does not require you to maintain a fork of gentoo.git on your own Codeberg profile. To set it up, clone the upstream URL and check out a branch locally:

git clone https://anongit.gentoo.org/git/repo/gentoo.git
cd gentoo
git remote add codeberg ssh://git@codeberg.org/gentoo/gentoo
git checkout -b my-new-fixes

Once you’re ready to create your PR:

git push codeberg HEAD:refs/for/master -o topic="$title"

and the PR should be created automatically. To push additional commits, repeat the above command - be sure that the same topic is used. If you wish to force-push updates (because you’re amending commits), add “-o force-push=true” to the above command.

More documentation can be found on our wiki.

2025 in retrospect & happy new year 2026!

GentooNews (https://www.gentoo.org/feeds/news.xml) — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 06:00:00 +0000

Happy New Year 2026! Once again, a lot has happened in Gentoo over the past months. New developers, more binary packages, GnuPG alternatives support, Gentoo for WSL, improved Rust bootstrap, better NGINX packaging, … As always here we’re going to revisit all the exciting news from our favourite Linux distribution.

Gentoo in numbers

Gentoo currently consists of 31663 ebuilds for 19174 different packages. For amd64 (x86-64), there are 89 GBytes of binary packages available on the mirrors. Gentoo each week builds 154 distinct installation stages for different processor architectures and system configurations, with an overwhelming part of these fully up-to-date.

The number of commits to the main ::gentoo repository has remained at an overall high level in 2025, with a slight decrease from 123942 to 112927. The number of commits by external contributors was 9396, now across 377 unique external authors.

GURU, our user-curated repository with a trusted user model, as entry point for potential developers, has shown a decrease in activity. We have had 5813 commits in 2025, compared to 7517 in 2024. The number of contributors to GURU has increased, from 241 in 2024 to 264 in 2025. Please join us there and help packaging the latest and greatest software. That’s the ideal preparation for becoming a Gentoo developer!

Activity has slowed down somewhat on the Gentoo bugtracker bugs.gentoo.org, where we’ve had 20763 bug reports created in 2025, compared to 26123 in 2024. The number of resolved bugs shows the same trend, with 22395 in 2025 compared to 25946 in 2024. The current values are closer to those of 2023 - but clearly this year we fixed more than we broke!

New developers

In 2025 we have gained four new Gentoo developers. They are in chronological order:

Jay Faulkner (jayf): Jay joined us in March from Washington, USA. In Gentoo and open source in general, he’s very much involved with OpenStack; further, he’s a a big sports fan, mainly ice hockey and NASCAR racing, and already long time Gentoo enthusiast.
Michael Mair-Keimberger (mm1ke): Michael joined us finally in June from Austria, after already amassing over 9000 commits beforehand. Michael works as Network Security Engineer for a big System House in Austria and likes to go jogging regulary and hike the mountains on weekends. In Gentoo, he’s active in quality control and cleanup.
Alexander Puck Neuwirth (apn-pucky): Alexander, a physics postdoc, joined us in July from Italy. At the intersection of Computer Science, Linux, and high-energy physics, he already uses Gentoo to manage his code and sees it as a great development environment. Beyond sci-physics, he’s also interested in continuous integration and RISC-V.
Jaco Kroon (jkroon): Jaco signed up as developer in October from South Africa. He is a system administrator who works for a company that runs and hosts multiple Gentoo installations, and has been around in Gentoo since 2003! Among our packages, Asterisk is one example of his interests.

Featured changes and news

Let’s now look at the major improvements and news of 2025 in Gentoo.

Distribution-wide Initiatives

Goodbye Github, welcome Codeberg: Mostly because of the continuous attempts to force Copilot usage for our repositories, Gentoo currently considers and plans the migration of our repository mirrors and pull request contributions to Codeberg. Codeberg is a site based on Forgejo, maintained by a non-profit organization, and located in Berlin, Germany. Gentoo continues to host its own primary git, bugs, etc infrastructure and has no plans to change that.
EAPI 9: The wording for EAPI 9, a new version of the specifications for our ebuilds, has been finalized and approved, and support in Portage is complete. New features in EAPI 9 include pipestatus for better error handling, an edo function for printing a command and executing it, a cleaner environment for the build processes, and the possibility of declaring a default EAPI for the profile directory tree.
Event presence: At FOSDEM 2025 in Brussels, Gentoo has been present once more with a stand, this year together with Flatcar Container Linux (which is based on Gentoo). Naturally we had mugs, stickers, t-shirts, and of course the famous self-compiled buttons… Further, we have been present at FrOSCon 2025 in Sankt Augustin with workshops Gentoo installation and configuration and Writing your own ebuilds. Last but not least, the toolchain team has represented Gentoo at the GNU Tools Cauldron 2025 in Porto.
SPI migration: The migration of our financial structure to Software in the Public Interest (SPI) is continuing slowly but steadily, with expense payments following the moving intake. If you are donating to Gentoo, and especially if you are a recurrent donor, please change your payments to be directed to SPI; see also our donation web page.
Online workshops: Our German support, Gentoo e.V., is grateful to the speakers and participants of four online workshops in 2025 in German and English, on topics as varied as EAPI 9 or GnuPG and LibrePGP. We are looking forward to more exciting events in 2026.

Architectures

RISC-V bootable QCOW2: Same as for amd64 and arm64, also for RISC-V we now have ready-made bootable disk images in QCOW2 format available for download on our mirrors in a console and a cloud-init variant. The disk images use the rv64gc instruction set and the lp64d ABI, and can be booted via the standard RISC-V UEFI support.
Gentoo for WSL: We now publish weekly Gentoo images for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), based on the amd64 stages, see our mirrors. While these images are not present in the Microsoft store yet, that’s something we intend to fix soon.
hppa and sparc destabilized: Since we do not have hardware readily available anymore and these architectures mostly fill a retrocomputing niche, stable keywords have been dropped for both hppa (PA-RISC) and sparc. The architectures will remain supported with testing keywords.
musl with locales: Localization support via the package sys-apps/musl-locales has been added by default to the Gentoo stages based on the lightweight musl C library.

Packages

GPG alternatives: Given the unfortunate fracturing of the GnuPG / OpenPGP / LibrePGP ecosystem due to competing standards, we now provide an alternatives mechanism to choose the system gpg provider and ease compatibility testing. At the moment, the original, unmodified GnuPG, the FreePG fork/patchset as also used in many other Linux distributions (Fedora, Debian, Arch, …), and the re-implementation Sequoia-PGP with Chameleon are available. In practice, implementation details vary between the providers, and while GnuPG and FreePG are fully supported, you may still encounter difficulties when selecting Sequoia-PGP/Chameleon.
zlib-ng support: We have introduced initial support for using zlib-ng and minizip-ng in compatibility mode in place of the reference zlib libraries.
System-wide jobserver: We have created steve, an implementation of a token-accounting system-wide jobserver, and introduced experimental global jobserver support in Portage. Thanks to that, it is now possible to globally control the concurrently running build job count, correctly accounting for parallel emerge jobs, make and ninja jobs, and other clients supporting the jobserver protocol.
NGINX rework: The packaging of the NGINX web server and reverse proxy in Gentoo has undergone a major improvement, including also the splitting off of several third-party modules into separate packages.
C++ based Rust bootstrap: We have added a bootstrap path for Rust from C++ using Mutabah’s Rust compiler mrustc, which alleviates the need for pre-built binaries and makes it significantly easier to support more configurations.
Ada and D bootstrap: Similarly, Ada and D support in gcc now have clean bootstrap paths, which makes enabling these in the compiler as easy as switching the useflags on gcc and running emerge.
FlexiBLAS: Gentoo has adopted the new FlexiBLAS wrapper library as the primary way of switching implementations of the BLAS numerical algorithm library at runtime. This automatically also provides ABI stability for linking programs and bundles the specific treatment of different BLAS variants in one place.
Python: In the meantime the default Python version in Gentoo has reached Python 3.13. Additionally we have also Python 3.14 available stable - fully up to date with upstream.
KDE upgrades: As of end of 2025, in Gentoo stable we have KDE Gear 25.08.3, KDE Frameworks 6.20.0, and KDE Plasma 6.5.4. As always, Gentoo testing follows the newest upstream releases (and using the KDE overlay you can even install from git sources).

Physical and Software Infrastructure

Additional build server: A second dedicated build server, hosted at Hetzner Germany, has been added to speed up the generation of installation stages, iso and qcow2 images, and binary packages.
Documentation: Documentation work has made constant progress on wiki.gentoo.org. The Gentoo Handbook had some particularly useful updates, and the documentation received lots of improvements and additions from the many active volunteers. There are currently 9,647 pages on the wiki, and there have been 766,731 edits since the project started. Please help Gentoo by contributing to documentation!

Finances of the Gentoo Foundation

Income: The Gentoo Foundation took in $12,066 in fiscal year 2025 (ending 2025/06/30); the dominant part (over 80%) consists of individual cash donations from the community. On the SPI side, we received $8,471 in the same period as fiscal year 2025; also here, this is all from small individual cash donations.
Expenses: Our expenses in 2025 were, program services (e.g. hosting costs) $8,332, management & general (accounting) $1,724, fundraising $905, and non-operating (depreciation expenses) $10,075.
Balance: We have $104,831 in the bank as of July 1, 2025 (which is when our fiscal year 2026 starts for accounting purposes). The Gentoo Foundation FY2025 financial statement is available on the Gentoo Wiki.
Transition to SPI: The Foundation encourages donors to ensure their ongoing contributions are going to SPI - more than 40 donors had not responded to requests to move the recurring donations by the end of the year. Expenses will be moved to the SPI structure as ongoing income permits.

Thank you!

As every year, we would like to thank all Gentoo developers and all who have submitted contributions for their relentless everyday Gentoo work. If you are interested and would like to help, please join us to make Gentoo even better! As a volunteer project, Gentoo could not exist without its community.

FOSDEM 2026

GentooNews (https://www.gentoo.org/feeds/news.xml) — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 06:00:00 +0000

Once again it’s FOSDEM time! Join us at Université Libre de Bruxelles, Campus du Solbosch, in Brussels, Belgium. The upcoming FOSDEM 2026 will be held on January 31st and February 1st 2026. If you visit FOSDEM, make sure to come by at our Gentoo stand (exact location still to be announced), for the newest Gentoo news and Gentoo swag. Also, this year there will be a talk about the official Gentoo binary packages in the Distributions devroom. Visit our Gentoo wiki page on FOSDEM 2026 to see who’s coming and for more practical information.

Urgent - OSU Open Source Lab needs your help

GentooNews (https://www.gentoo.org/feeds/news.xml) — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 05:00:00 +0000

Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab (OSL) has been a major supporter of Gentoo Linux and many other software projects for years. It is currently hosting several of our infrastructure servers as well as development machines for exotic architectures, and is critical for Gentoo operation.

Due to drops in sponsor contributions, OSL has been operating at loss for a while, with the OSU College of Engineering picking up the rest of the bill. Now, university funding has been cut, this is not possible anymore, and unless US$ 250.000 can be provided within the next two weeks OSL will have to shut down. The details can be found in a blog post of Lance Albertson, the director of OSL.

Please, if you value and use Gentoo Linux or any of the other projects that OSL has been supporting, and if you are in a position to make funds available, if this is true for the company you work for, etc … contact the address in the blog post. Obviously, long-term corporate sponsorships would here serve best - for what it’s worth, OSL developers have ended up at almost every big US tech corporation by now. Right now probably everything helps though.

Bootable Gentoo QCOW2 disk images - ready for the cloud!

GentooNews (https://www.gentoo.org/feeds/news.xml) — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 06:00:00 +0000

We are very happy to announce new official downloads on our website and our mirrors: Gentoo for amd64 (x86-64) and arm64 (aarch64), as immediately bootable disk images in qemu’s QCOW2 format! The images, updated weekly, include an EFI boot partition and a fully functional Gentoo installation; either with no network activated but a password-less root login on the console (“no root pw”), or with network activated, all accounts initially locked, but cloud-init running on boot (“cloud-init”). Enjoy, and read on for more!

Questions and answers

How can I quickly test the images?

We recommend using the “no root password” images and qemu system emulation. Both amd64 and arm64 images have all the necessary drivers ready for that. Boot them up, use as login name “root”, and you will immediately get a fully functional Gentoo shell. The set of installed packages is similar to that of an administration or rescue system, with a focus more on network environment and less on exotic hardware. Of course you can emerge whatever you need though, and binary package sources are already configured too.

What settings do I need for qemu?

You need qemu with the target architecture (aarch64 or x86_64) enabled in QEMU_SOFTMMU_TARGETS, and the UEFI firmware.

app-emulation/qemu
sys-firmware/edk2-bin

You should disable the useflag “pin-upstream-blobs” on qemu and update edk2-bin at least to the 2024 version. Also, since you probably want to use KVM hardware acceleration for the virtualization, make sure that your kernel supports that and that your current user is in the kvm group.

For testing the amd64 (x86-64) images, a command line could look like this, configuring 8G RAM and 4 CPU threads with KVM acceleration:

qemu-system-x86_64 \
        -m 8G -smp 4 -cpu host -accel kvm -vga virtio -smbios type=0,uefi=on \
        -drive if=pflash,unit=0,readonly=on,file=/usr/share/edk2/OvmfX64/OVMF_CODE_4M.qcow2,format=qcow2 \
        -drive file=di-amd64-console.qcow2 &

For testing the arm64 (aarch64) images, a command line could look like this:

qemu-system-aarch64 \
        -machine virt -cpu neoverse-v1 -m 8G -smp 4 -device virtio-gpu-pci -device usb-ehci -device usb-kbd \
        -drive if=pflash,unit=0,readonly=on,file=/usr/share/edk2/ArmVirtQemu-AARCH64/QEMU_EFI.qcow2 \
        -drive file=di-arm64-console.qcow2 &

Please consult the qemu documentation for more details.

Can I install the images onto a real harddisk / SSD?

Sure. Gentoo can do anything. The limitations are:

you need a disk with sector size 512 bytes (otherwise the partition table of the image file will not work), see the “SSZ” value in the following example:

pinacolada ~ # blockdev --report /dev/sdb
RO    RA   SSZ   BSZ        StartSec            Size   Device
rw   256   512  4096               0   4000787030016   /dev/sdb

your machine must be able to boot via UEFI (no legacy boot)
you may have to adapt the configuration yourself to disks, hardware, …

So, this is an expert workflow.

Assuming your disk is /dev/sdb and has a size of at least 20GByte, you can then use the utility qemu-img to decompress the image onto the raw device. Warning, this obviously overwrites the first 20Gbyte of /dev/sdb (and with that the existing boot sector and partition table):

qemu-img convert -O raw di-amd64-console.qcow2 /dev/sdb

Afterwards, you can and should extend the new root partition with xfs_growfs, create an additional swap partition behind it, possibly adapt /etc/fstab and the grub configuration, …

If you are familiar with partitioning and handling disk images you can for sure imagine more workflow variants; you might find also the qemu-nbd tool interesting.

So what are the cloud-init images good for?

Well, for the cloud. Or more precisely, for any environment where a configuration data source for cloud-init is available. If this is already provided for you, the image should work out of the box. If not, well, you can provide the configuration data manually, but be warned that this is a non-trivial task.

Are you planning to support further architectures?

Eventually yes, in particular (EFI) riscv64 and loongarch64.

Are you planning to support legacy boot?

No, since the placement of the bootloader outside the file system complicates things.

How about disks with 4096 byte sectors?

Well… let’s see how much demand this feature finds. If enough people are interested, we should be able to generate an alternative image with a corresponding partition table.

Why XFS as file system?

It has some features that ext4 is sorely missing (reflinks and copy-on-write), but at the same time is rock-solid and reliable.

Tinderbox shutdown

ago (ago) — Sat, 01 Feb 2025 07:08:08 +0000

Due to the lack of hardware, the Tinderbox (and CI) service is no longer operational.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the people who have always seen the Tinderbox as a valuable resource and who have promptly addressed bugs, significantly improving the quality of the packages we have in Portage as well as the user experience.