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  • Gentoo x86-64-v3 binary packages available
    End of December 2023 we already made our officialannouncement of binary Gentoo package hosting. The initial package set for amd64 was and is base-line x86-64, i.e., it should work on any 64bit Intel or AMD machine. Now, we are happy toannounce that there is also a separate package set using the Read on for more details…
    Questions & AnswersHow can I check if my machine supports x86-64-v3?
    The easiest way to do this is to use glibc’s dynamic linker:
    larry@noumea ~ $ ld.so --helpUsage: ld.so [OPTION]... EXECUTABLE-FILE [ARGS-FOR-PROGRAM...]You have invoked 'ld.so', the program interpreter for dynamically-linkedELF programs. Usually, the program interpreter is invoked automaticallywhen a dynamically-linked executable is started.[...][...]Subdirectories of glibc-hwcaps directories, in priority order: x86-64-v4 x86-64-v3 (supported, searched) x86-64-v2 (supported, searched)larry@noumea ~ $
    As you can see, this laptop supports x86-64-v2 and x86-64-v3, but not x86-64-v4.
    How do I use the new x86-64-v3 packages?
    On your amd64 machine, edit the configuration file in /etc/portage/binrepos.conf/that defines the URI from where the packages are downloaded, and replace x86-64 withx86-64-v3. E.g., if you have so far
    sync-uri = https://distfiles.gentoo.org/releases/amd64/binpackages/17.1/x86-64/
    then you change the URI to
    sync-uri = https://distfiles.gentoo.org/releases/amd64/binpackages/17.1/x86-64-v3/
    That’s all.
    Why don’t you have x86-64-v4 packages?
    There’s not yet enough hardware and people out there that could use them.

    We could start building such packages at any time (our build host is new and shiny), but for now we recommend you build from source and use yourown CFLAGS then. After all, if your machine supports x86-64-v4, it’s definitely fast…
    Why is there recently so much noise about x86-64-v3 support in Linux distros?
    Beats us. The ISA is 9 years old (just the tag x86-64-v3 was slapped ontoit recently), so you’d think binaries would have been generated by now. With Gentoo you could’ve done (and probably have done) it all the time.

    That said, in some processor lines (i.e. Atom), support for this instructionset was introduced rather late (2021).


  • 2023 in retrospect & happy new year 2024!
    A Happy New Year 2024 to all of you! We hope you enjoyed the fireworks; we tried to contributeto these too with the binary package news just before new year! That’s not the only thing in Gentoo thatwas new in 2023 though; as in the previous years, let’s look back and give it a review.
    Gentoo in numbers
    The number of commits to the main ::gentoo repository has remained at an overall high level in 2023, only slightly lower from 126682 to 121000. The number of commits by external contributors has actually increased from 10492 to 10708,now across 404 unique external authors.

    GURU, our user-curated repository with a trusted user model, is still attracting a lot of potential developers.We have had 5045 commits in 2023, a slight decrease from 5751 in 2022.The number of contributors to GURU has increased clearly however, from 134 in 2022 to 158 in 2023. Please join us there and help packaging the latest and greatest software. That’s the ideal preparation for becoming a Gentoo developer!

    On the Gentoo bugtracker bugs.gentoo.org, we’ve had 24795 bug reportscreated in 2023, compared to 26362 in 2022. The number of resolved bugs shows a similartrend, with 22779 in 2023 compared to 24681 in 2022. Many of these bugs are stabilizationrequests; a possible interpretation is that stable Gentoo is becoming more and more current, catching up with new software releases.
    New developers
    In 2023 we have gained 3 new Gentoo developers. They are in chronological order:

    Arsen Arsenović (arsen):Arsen joined up as a developer right at the start of the year in January from Belgrade, Serbia. He’s a computer science studentinterested in both maths and music, active in many different free software projects, and has alreadymade his impression, e.g., in our emacs and toolchain projects.

    Paul Fox (ris):After already being very active in our Wiki for some time, Paul joined in March as developer from France. Activity on our wiki and documentation quality will certainly grow much further with his help.

    Petr Vaněk (arkamar):Petr Vaněk, from Prague, Czech Republic, joined the ranks of our developers in November. Gentoo user since 2009, craft beer enthusiast, and Linux kernel contributor, he has already beenactive in very diverse corners of Gentoo.
    Featured changes and news
    Let’s now look at the major improvements and news of 2023 in Gentoo.
    Distribution-wide Initiatives
    Binary package hosting: Gentoo shockingly now also provides binary packages, for easier and faster installation! For amd64 and arm64, we’ve gota stunning >20 GByte of packages on our mirrors, from LibreOffice to KDE Plasma and from Gnome to Docker.Also, would you think 9-year old x86-64-v3 is still experimental? We have it already on our mirrors! For all other architectures and ABIs, the binary package files used for building the installation stages (including the build tool chain) are available for download.

    New 23.0 profiles in preparation:A new profile version, i.e. a collection of presets and configurations, is at the moment undergoing internal preparation and testing for all architectures. It’s not ready yet, but will integrate more toolchain hardening by default, as well as fix alot of internal inconsistencies. Stay tuned for an announcement with more details in the near future.

    Modern C: Work continues on porting Gentoo, and the Linux userland at large, to Modern C. This is a real marathon effort rather than a sprint (just see our tracker bug for it). Ourefforts together with the same project ongoing in Fedora have already helped many upstreams,which have accepted patches in preparation for GCC 14 (that starts to enforce themodern language usage).

    Event presence: At the Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting (FOSDEM) 2023, the Free and Open Source Software Conference (FrOSCon) 2023, and the ChemnitzerLinux-Tage (CLT) 2023, Gentoo had a booth with mugs, stickers, t-shirts, and of course the famousself-compiled buttons.

    Google Summer of Code: In 2023 Gentoo had another successful year participating in the Google Summer of Code. We had three contributorscompleting their projects; you can find out more about them by visiting the Gentoo GSoC blog. We thank our contributors Catcream, LabBrat, and Listout, and also all the developers who took the time to mentor them.

    Online workshops: Our German support, Gentoo e.V., organized this year 6 online workshops on buildingand improving ebuilds. This will be continued every two months in the upcoming year.

    Documentation on wiki.gentoo.org has been making great progress as always. This past year the contributor’s guide, article writing guidelines, and help pages were updated to give the best possible start to anyone ready to lend a hand. The Gentoo Handbook got updates, and a new changelog. Of course much documentation was fixed, extended, or updated, and quitea few new pages were created. We hope to see even more activity in the new year, and hopefullysome new contributors - editing documentation is a particularly easy area to start contributing to Gentoo in, pleasegive it a try!
    Architectures
    Alpha: Support for the DEC Alpha architecture was revived, with a massive keywording effort going on. While not perfectly complete yet, we are very close to a fully consistent dependency tree and package set for alpha again.

    musl: Support for the lightweight musl libc has been added to the architectures MIPS (o32) and m68k, with corresponding profiles in the Gentoo repository and corresponding installation stages and binary packages available for download. Enjoy!
    Packages
    .NET: The Gentoo Dotnet project has significantly improved support for building .NET-based software, using the nuget, dotnet-pkg-base, and dotnet-pkg eclasses. Now we’re ready for packages depending on the .NET ecosystem and fordevelopers using dotnet-sdk on Gentoo. New software requiring .NET is constantly being added to the main Gentoo tree. Recent additions include PowerShell for Linux, Denaro (a finance application), Pinta (a graphics program), Ryujinx (a NS emulator)and many other aimed straight at developing .NET projects.

    Java: OpenJDK 21 has been introduced for amd64, arm64, ppc64, and x86!

    Python:In the meantime the default Python version in Gentoo has reached Python 3.11. Additionally we havealso Python 3.12 available stable - again we’re fully up to date with upstream.

    PyPy3 compatibility for scientific Python:While some packages (numexpr, pandas, xarray) are at the moment still undergoing upstream bug fixing, more and more scientific Python packages have been adapted in Gentoo and upstream for the speed-optimized Python variant PyPy. This can provide a nice performance boost for numerical data analysis…

    Signed kernel modules and (unified) kernel images: We now support signing of both in-tree and out-of-tree kernel modules and kernel images. This is useful for those who would like the extra bit of verification offered by Secure Boot, which is now easier than ever to set up on Gentoo systems! Additionally, our kernel install scripts and eclasses are now fully compatible with Unified Kernel Images and our prebuilt gentoo-kernel-bin can now optionally install an experimental pregenerated generic Unified Kernel Image.

    The GAP System:A new dev-gap package category has arrived with about sixty packages.GAP is a popular system for computationaldiscrete algebra, with particular emphasis on Computational GroupTheory. GAP consists of a programming language, a library of thousandsof functions implementing algebraic algorithms written in the GAPlanguage, and large data libraries of algebraic objects. It has its ownpackage ecosystem, mostly written in the GAP language with a few C components.
    Physical and Software Infrastructure
    Portage improvements: A significant amount of work went into enhancing our package manager, Portage, to better support binary package deployment. Users building their own binary packages and setting up their own infrastructure will certainly benefitfrom it too.

    packages.gentoo.org: The development of Gentoo’s package database website,packages.gentoo.org, has picked up speed, with new features for maintainer, category, and arch pages, and Repology integration. Many optimization were done for the backend database queries and the website should now feel faster to use.

    pkgdev bugs: A new developer tool called pkgdev bugs enables us now tosimplify the procedure for filing new stable requests bugs a lot. By just giving it version lists (which can be generated by other tools),pkgdev bugs can be used to compute dependencies, cycles, merges, and will filethe bugs for the architecture teams / testers. This allows us to step ahead much fasterwith package stabilizations.
    Finances of the Gentoo Foundation
    Income: The Gentoo Foundation took in approximately $18,500 in fiscal year 2023;the majority (over 80%) were individual cash donations from the community.

    Expenses: Our expenses in 2023 were, as split into the usual three categories,operating expenses (for services, fees, …) $6,000, only minor capital expenses (for bought assets), and depreciation expenses (value loss of existing assets) $20,000.

    Balance: We have about $101,000 in the bank as of July 1, 2023 (which is whenour fiscal year 2023 ends for accounting purposes). The draft finanical reportfor 2023 is available on the Gentoo Wiki.
    Thank you!
    Obviously this is not all Gentoo development that happened in 2023. From KDE to GNOME, from kernels to scientific software, you can find much more if you look at the details.As every year, we would like to thank all Gentoo developers and all who have submitted contributionsfor their relentless everyday Gentoo work. As a volunteer project, Gentoo could not exist without them. And if you are interested and would like to contribute, please join us andhelp us make Gentoo even better!


  • Gentoo goes Binary!
    You probably all know Gentoo Linux as your favourite source-based distribution.Did you know that our package manager, Portage, already for years also has support for binarypackages, and that source- and binary-based package installations can be freely mixed?

    To speed up working with slow hardware and for overall convenience, we’re now also offeringbinary packages for download and direct installation! For most architectures, this islimited to the core system and weekly updates - not so for amd64 and arm64 however. There we’ve got a stunning >20 GByte of packages on our mirrors, from LibreOffice to KDE Plasma and from Gnome to Docker.Gentoo stable, updated daily. Enjoy! And read on for more details!
    Questions & AnswersHow can I set up my existing Gentoo installation to use these packages?
    Quick setup instructions forthe most common cases can be found in our wiki. In short, you need to create a configuration file in /etc/portage/binrepos.conf/.

    In addition, we have a rather neat binary package guide onour Wiki that goes into much more detail.
    What do I have to do with a new stage / new installation?
    New stages already contain the suitable /etc/portage/binrepos.conf/gentoobinhost.conf. You aregood to go from the start, although you may want to replace the src-uri setting in there with an URI pointing to the corresponding directory on a local mirror.

    $ emerge -uDNavg @world
    What compile settings, use flags, … do the ‘‘normal’’ amd64 packages use?
    The binary packages under amd64/binpackages/17.1/x86-64 are compiled usingCFLAGS="-march=x86-64 -mtune=generic -O2 -pipe" and will work with any amd64 / x86-64 machine.

    The available useflag settings and versions correspond to the stable packagesof the amd64/17.1/nomultilib (i.e., openrc), amd64/17.1/desktop/plasma/systemd,and amd64/17.1/desktop/gnome/systemd profiles. This should provide fairly largecoverage.
    What compile settings, use flags, … do the ‘‘normal’’ arm64 packages use?
    The binary packages under arm64/binpackages/17.0/arm64 are compiled usingCFLAGS="-O2 -pipe" and will work with any arm64 / AArch64 machine.

    The available useflag settings and versions correspond to the stable packagesof the arm64/17.0 (i.e., openrc), arm64/17.0/desktop/plasma/systemd,and arm64/17.0/desktop/gnome/systemd profiles.
    But hey, that’s not optimized for my CPU!
    Tough luck. You can still compile packages yourself just as before!
    What settings do the packages for other architectures and ABIs use?
    The binary package hosting is wired up with the stage builds. Whichmeans, for about every stage there is a binary package hosting which covers (only) the stage contents and settings. There are no further plans to expand coverage for now. But hey, this includes the compiler (gcc orclang) and the whole build toolchain!
    Are the packages cryptographically signed?
    Yes, with the same key as the stages.
    Are the cryptographic signatures verified before installation?
    Yes, with one limitation (in the default setting).

    Portage knows two binary package formats, XPAK (old) and GPKG (new). Only GPKG supportscryptographic signing. Until recently, XPAK was the default setting (and it may stillbe the default on your installation since this is not changed during upgrade, but onlyat new installation).

    The new, official Gentoo binary packages are all in GPKG format.GPKG packages have their signature verified, and if this fails, installation is refused.To avoid breaking compatibility with old binary packages, by default XPAKpackages (which do not have signatures) can still be installed however.

    If you want to require verified signatures (which is something we strongly recommend), set FEATURES="binpkg-request-signature" in make.conf. Then, obviously, you can alsoonly use GPKG packages.
    I get an error that signatures cannot be verified.
    Try running the Gentoo Trust Tool getuto as root.

    $ getuto

    This should set up the required key ring with the Gentoo Release Engineering keys forPortage.

    If you have FEATURES="binpkg-request-signature" enabled in make.conf, then getutois called automatically before every binary package download operation, to make surethat key updates and revocations are imported.
    I’ve made binary packages myself and portage refuses to use them now!
    Well, you found the side effect of FEATURES="binpkg-request-signature".For your self-made packages you will need to set up a signing key and have that keytrusted by the anchor in /etc/portage/gnupg.

    The binary package guide onour Wiki will be helpful here.
    My download is slow.
    Then pretty please use a local mirrorinstead of downloading from University of Oregon. You can just edit the URI in your /etc/portage/binrepos.conf. And yes, that’s safe, because of the cryptographic signature.
    My Portage still wants to compile from source.
    If you use useflag combinations deviating from the profile default, thenyou can’t and won’t use the packages. Portage will happily mix and match thoughand combine binary packages with locally compiled ones. Gentoo still remainsa source-based distribution, and we are not aiming for a full binary-only installation without any compilation at all.
    Can I use the packages on a merged-usr system?
    Yes. (If anything breaks, then this is a bug and should be reported.)
    Can I use the packages with other (older or newer) profile versions?
    No. That’s why the src-uri path contains, e.g., “17.1”.When there’s a new profile version, we’ll also provide new, separate package directories.
    Any plans to offer binary packages of ~amd64 ?
    Not yet. This would mean a ton of rebuilds… If we offer it one day, it’ll be at a separate URI for technical reasons.

    The advice for now is to stick to stable as much as possible, and locallyadd in package.accept_keywords whatever packages from testing you want to use.This means you can still use a large amount of binary packages, and justcompile the rest yourself.
    I have found a problem, with portage or a specific package!
    Then please ask for advice (on IRC, the forums, or a mailing list) and/or file a bug!

    Binary package support has been tested for some time, but with many more people usingit edge cases will certainly occur, and quality bug reports are always appreciated!
    Any pretty pictures?
    Of course! Here’s the amount of binary package data in GByte for each architecture…



  • Gentoo accepted into Google Summer of Code 2023
    Do you want to learn more about Gentoo and contribute to your favouritefree software project?! Once again, now for the 11th time,we have been accepted as a mentoring organization for this year’s Google Summer of Code!

    The GSoC is an excellent opportunity for gaining real-world experience in software design and making oneself known in the broader open source community. It also looks great on a resume. Some initial project ideas can be found here, butnew projects ideas are also welcome. For new projects time is of the essence: they have to be worked out, discussed with the mentors, and submitted before the April 4th deadline. It is strongly recommended that contributorsrefine new project ideas with a mentor before proposing the idea formally.

    Potential GSoC contributors are encouraged to e-mail the GSoC adminswith their name, IRC nickname, and the desired project, and discuss ideas in the#gentoo-soc IRC channel on Libera Chat. Further information can be found on the Gentoo GSoC 2023 wiki page. Those with unanswered questions should also not hesitate to contact the Summer of Codementors via their mailing list.


  • 2022 in retrospect & late happy new year 2023!
    A quite late Happy New Year 2023 to all of you!

    Once again with 2022 an eventful year has passed, and Gentoo is still alive and kicking! 2023 already started some time ago and some of us have even already been meeting up and networking at FOSDEM 2023. Still, we are happy to present once more a review of the Gentoo news of the past year 2022. Read on for new developers, distribution wide initiatives and improvements, up-to-date numbers on Gentoo development, tales from the infrastructure, and all the fresh new packages you can emerge now.
    Gentoo in numbers
    The number of commits to the main ::gentoo repository has remained at high level in 2022, from 126920 to 126682. This is also true for the number of commits by external contributors, 10492,now across an even increased 440 unique external authors compared to 435 lastyear.

    GURU, our user-curated repository with a trusted user model, is clearly growing further.We have had 5761 commits in 2022, up by 12% from 5131 in 2021.The number of contributors to GURU has increased similarly, from 125 in 2021 to 144 in 2022. Please join us there and help packaging the latest and greatest software. That’s the ideal preparation for becoming a full Gentoo developer!

    On the Gentoo bugtracker bugs.gentoo.org, both the numberof reported and of resolved bugs has increased clearly. We’ve had 26362 bug reportscreated in 2022, compared to 24056 in 2021. The number of resolved bugs shows a similartrend, with 24499 in 2022 compared to 24076 in 2021.
    New developers
    In 2022 we have gained four new Gentoo developers. They are in chronological order:

    Matthew Smith (matthew):Matthew joined usalready in February from the North East of England. By trade embedded software developer, he helps witha diverse set of packages, from mold to erlang and from nasm to tree-sitter.

    WANG Xuerui (xen0n):A long-time Gentoo user, Xuerui joined us as a developer in March from Shanghai, China.He jumped in right into the deep end, bringing LoongArch support to Gentoo as wellas lots of toolchain and qemu expertise (as long as his cat lets him).

    Kenton Groombridge (concord):Kenton comes from the US and from a real Gentoo family (yes, such a thing exists!); he joined up in May.His speciality is Gentoo Hardened and SELinux, and he has already collected quite somecommits there!

    Viorel Munteanu (ceamac):In November, Viorel joined us fromBucharest, Romania. He’s active in the virtualization and proxy maintainers teams, and takes care of the VirtualBox stack and, e.g., TigerVNC.
    Featured changes and news
    Let’s now look at the major improvements and news of 2022 in Gentoo.
    Distribution-wide Initiatives
    LiveGUI Gentoo ISO download: For an instant, full-fledged Gentoo experience we now havea weekly-built 3.7GByte amd64 LiveGUI ISOready for download. It is suitable for booting from DVDs or USB sticks, and boots into a full KDE Plasma desktop based on stable Gentoo. A ton of ready-to-use software is included, from dozens of systemutilities, LibreOffice, Inkscape, and TeXLive all the way to Firefox and Chromium. Also, all build dependencies are installed and youcan emerge additional packages as you like!

    Modern C porting:This recent cross-distribution initiative has as its objective to port as much open sourcesoftware as possible to modern C standards. Upcoming versions of GCC and Clang will eventuallylose support for constructs that have been deprecated for decades, and we will have to be prepared for that. Together with Fedorawe have taken the lead here, and a lot of effort has already gone into fixing and modernization.

    Clang / LLVM as primary system compiler: Closely related, support for using Clang as the primary system compiler in Gentoo has never been better than now. For the most popular architectures, we have LLVM stages available which replace the GNU toolchain as far as possible (also using libc++, compiler-rc, lld, …) While glibc at the moment still requires GCC to build, the LLVM/musl stages come fully withoutGNU toolchain.

    New binary package format gpkg: Gentoo’s package manager Portage now supports a new binary package format defined in GLEP 78. Besides many minor improvements, the most important new feature of the file format is that it fully supports cryptographic signing of packages. This was one of the most important roadblocks for more extensive binarypackage support in Gentoo.

    merged-usr profiles and systemd merged-usr stages:All systemd profiles have now gained a merged-usr subprofile, corresponding to a filesystem layout where, e.g., /bin is a symbolic link to /usr/bin. The migrationprocedure has been described in detail in a news item. With this, we prepare for the time when systemd will only support the merged-usr layout anymore, as already announced by the upstream developers. Across all architectures, we also now consistently offer in addition to openrc downloadssystemd stages with and without merged-usr layout. Merged-usr openrc stages will followfor completeness.
    Architectures
    LoongArch64: In the meantime, LoongArch64, a Chinese development by Loongson Co. based in parts on MIPS and on RISC-V, has become a fully supported Gentoo architecture,with toolchain support, widespread keywording, and up-to-date stages for download.First server-type chipsets based on these chips are currently being sold.(Outside mainland China hardware is difficult to obtain though.)

    AArch64: An exotic variant of AArch64 (arm64) has been added to our download portfolio: Big-endian AArch64. Enjoy!

    PA-RISC: Weekly stage builds for the hppa architecture (PA-RISC) are back, including systemd images for both hppa-1.1 and hppa-2.0 and an installation CD.

    MIPS: The weekly builds for MIPS are back as well! Here, we can now offer downloadsfor the o32, n32, and n64 ABI plus multilib stages - and all that for both endiannessvariants and init systems. No matter what your hardware is, you should find a starting point.

    Hardened: With more and more hardening becoming de-facto standard, the compiler settings in the hardened profiles have been tightened againto include additional experimental switches. In particular, in Gentoo Hardened, gccand clang both now default to _FORTIFY_SOURCE=3, C++ standard library assertions,and enabled stack-clash-protection.
    Packages
    Modern Java: A huge amount of work was done by our Java project to revive the language ecosystem and in particular recent Java versions in Gentoo. Additionally, OpenJDK 11 and OpenJDK 17 were bootstrapped for big-endian ppc64, as well as for x86, riscv, and arm64 with musl as C library, enablingthe usage of modern Java on those configurations.

    GNU Emacs: Emacs ebuild-mode has seen a flurry of activity in 2022. New features includea new ebuild-repo-mode, inserting of user’s name and date stamp in package.mask and friends,support for pkgdev and pkgcheck commands, support for colors in ebuild command output,and a major refactoring of the code for keyword highlighting.Additionally, there’s flycheck-pkgcheck for on-the-fly linting and company-ebuild for automatic completion.

    Mathematics: The sci-mathematics category has grown with the addition of theorem provers such as lean, yices2, cadabra, or picosat.Further, the Coq Proof Assistant ecosystem support has been improved with new Coq versions, Emacs support via company-coq, and packagessuch as coq-mathcomp, coq-serapi, flocq, gappalib-coq …

    Alternatives: Many base system utilities exist in different flavours that are more or less drop-inreplacements. One example of this is the compressor bzip2, with lbzip2 and pbzip2 asparallelizing alternatives; another tar, which exists both as gtar (GNU tar) and asbsdtar in libarchive. With alternatives we now have a clean system in place to use either of these options as default program via a symlinked binary.

    Racket: An ongoing project aims to bring first-class support for Racket,a modern dialect of Lisp and a descendant of Scheme, and the Racket language ecosystem to Gentoo.

    Python:In the meantime the default Python version in Gentoo has reached Python 3.10. Additionally we havealso Python 3.11 available stable, which means we’re fully up to date with upstream.Gentoo testing provides the alpha releases of Python 3.12, so we can easily prepare forwhat comes next.
    Physical and Software Infrastructure
    Hardware: Our infrastructure team has set up two beefy new servers as Ganetinodes hosted at OSUOSL, with 2x AMD EPYC 7543, 1TiB RAM, 22TiB NVME, and 25Gbit networking each.These will provide virtual machines for various services in the future. A new 1/10/25Gbit switch was also addedto better support new and existing servers.

    Gitlab:We are now running an experimental self-hosted Gitlab instance, gitlab.gentoo.org. It will slowly take over and serve more and more git repositories.

    Pkgcore:Building on existing coding efforts, an official Gentoo PkgCore project was created to improve this set of QA and commit tools for Gentoo developers. Repoman was deprecated and removed from the Portage code base, and pkgcheck, part of PkgCore, has become the official QA tool for commits to the main Gentoorepository. It is also the code running our automated continuous integration system.

    Tattoo: The new tattoo arch testing system now manages and automates large parts of the architecture testing process. This has simplified and streamlined the stabilization process,shortening developer response times and “saving” arch stabilization.

    Devmanual: The Gentoo Development Manual has seen majorimprovements in 2022. More documentation is good!
    Finances of the Gentoo Foundation
    Income: The Gentoo Foundation took in approximately $16,500 in fiscal year 2022;the majority (over 90%) were individual cash donations from the community.

    Expenses: Our expenses in 2022 were, as split into the usual three categories,operating expenses (for services, fees, …) $11,000, capital expenses (for bought assets) $55,000 (servers, networking gear, SSDs, …), and depreciation expenses(value loss of existing assets) $9,500.

    Balance: We have about $97,000 in the bank as of July 1, 2022 (which is whenour fiscal year 2022 ends for accounting purposes). The draft finanical reportfor 2022 is available on the Gentoo Wiki.
    Thank you!
    Our end of year review of course cannot cover everything that happened in Gentoo in 2022 in detail, and if you look closely you will find much more.We would like to thank all Gentoo developers and all who have submitted contributionsfor their relentless everyday Gentoo work. As a volunteer project, Gentoo could not exist without them.

    And now let’s look forward to the new year 2023, with hopefully less unpleasant surprisesthan the last one!



  • New Gentoo LiveGUI ISO and artwork / branding contest!
    After a long break, we now have again a weekly LiveGUI ISO image for amd64 available! The download, suitable for an USB stick or a dual-layer DVD, boots directly into KDE Plasma and comes with a ton of up-to-date software. This ranges from office applicactions such as LibreOffice, Inkscape, and Gimp all the way to many system administrator tools.

    Now, we need your help! Let’s make this the coolest and most beautiful Linux live image ever. We’re calling for submissions of artwork, themes, actually anything from a desktop background to a boot manager animation, on the topic of Gentoo! The winning entry will be added as default setting to the official LiveGUI images, and also be available for download and installation.
    The artwork contestWhat are we looking for?
    Gentoo-themed artwork and branding material to make our Gentoo LiveGUI the coolest Linux live medium ever.
    Incorporates the Gentoo logo and maybe other Gentoo design elements (like Larry the Cow) Works for a wide range of screen resolutions etc. Is packaged more or less ready-to-use for our LiveGUI image Provides a coherent experience to the user, i.e., if it consists of different parts, these fit togehter Can be distributed in its entirety under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license
    We could for example imagine screen backgrounds, Plasma theming, maybe even a GRUB boot menu animation or a LibreOffice splash screen… Feel free to come up with more ideas.

    If you base your work on freely available source material created by others, please keep track of the sources and their licenses in an accompanying readme file.
    What are we not looking for? Do not submit anything that infringes on third-party copyrights or trademarks. While a Star Trek-themed Gentoo desktop would be cool, Paramount might object and we wouldn’t be able to distribute it. Same for My Little Pony or the Simpsons. Do not submit artwork falling under the not-safe-for-work (NSFW) category. We will recognize it when we see it, and we won’t be able to distribute it. Do not submit artwork with political or religious statements. No matter how universally acceptable you think that these are, someone will be offended by them.
    The artwork should be such that kids or colleagues can walk into your office and you don’t have to quickly cover it up. :) Also, please think of your contribution in terms of the Gentoo Code of Conduct.
    How to submit an entryPackage it up Package all the relevant files into a single tar archive and upload it to a webserver of your choice, or publish the files (e.g. on github) as a single git repository. Add a readme file with your name and contact e-mail address, the license of the files, sources and licenses for third-party material, and detailed installation instructions File a bug for the release engineering team, component “LiveCD/DVD”, with the summary starting with “Artwork 2022 contest entry”, and add a link to your file. If you link to a git repository, please mention a tag or commit which we should use. By submitting your entry, you allow Gentoo to download, re-publish, and distribute your files (see also above remark about the license).Deadline The contest ends 31/May/2022 at 23:59 UTC. Please keep your files online for at least one more month after that date, so we can review and copy them.Selection and announcement of the winner The jury consists of the Gentoo Council, the Release Engineering team, the Artwork team, and the Public Relations team (as of beginning of April 2022). The winner will be chosen by vote; depending on the amount and quality of the submissions, we may also pick a runner-up or more. The announcement of the winner or the winners will be made in June.The LiveGUI image
    The LiveGUI image is first and foremost provided to show off Gentoo and give everyone a chance to test a full-fledged Gentoo installation. As such, we have a lot of typical “desktop applications” installed. Additionally, we tried to integrate as many system administration tools as possible, so you can also use it for everything from repartitioning your hard drives to repairing an installation.

    Some of the software on the image:
    KDE Plasma as desktop environment Office productivity: LibreOffice, LyX, TeXstudio, XournalPP, kile Web browsers: Firefox, Chromium IRC and similar: irssi, weechat Editors: Emacs, vim, kate, nano, joe Development and source control: git, subversion, gcc, Python, Perl Graphics: Inkscape, Gimp, Povray, Luminance HDR, Digikam Video: KDEnlive Disk management: hddtemp, testdisk, hdparm, nvme-cli, gparted, partimage, btrfs-progs, ddrescue, dosfstools, e2fsprogs, zfs Network tools and daemons: nmap, tcpdump, traceroute, minicom, pptpclient, bind-tools, cifs-utils, nfs-utils, ftp, chrony, ntp, openssh, rdesktop, openfortivpn, openvpn, tor Backup: mt-st, fsarchiver Benchmarks: bonnie, bonnie++, dbench, iozone, stress, tiobench …
    The list of targeted packages (corresponding to a world file) can be found in the catalyst specification file; we install the newest stable version in the Gentoo repository.

    In addition, since - as in a normal Gentoo installation - compiler and development tools are available, you can temporarily install more software. Just run emerge --sync and then install whatever you need (though it will be kept in memory and be gone after the next reboot).

    Feedback and of course bug reports are welcome! Enjoy!


  • Gentoo accepted into Google Summer of Code 2022
    Do you want to learn more about Gentoo and contribute to your favouritefree software project?! Once again, now for the 10th time,we have been accepted as a mentoring organization for this year’s Google Summer of Code!

    The GSoC is an excellent opportunity for gaining real-world experience in software design and making oneself known in the broader open source community. It also looks great on a resume. Some initial project ideas can be found here, butnew projects ideas are also welcome. For new projects time is of the essence: they have to be worked out, discussed with the mentors, and submitted before the April 19th deadline. It is strongly recommended that contributorsrefine new project ideas with a mentor before proposing the idea formally.

    Potential GSoC contributors are encouraged to e-mail the GSoC adminswith their name, IRC nickname, and the desired project, and discuss ideas in the#gentoo-soc IRC channel on Libera Chat. Further information can be found on the Gentoo GSoC 2022 wiki page. Those with unanswered questions should also not hesitate to contact the Summer of Codementors via their mailing list.



  • 2021 in retrospect & happy new year 2022!
    Happy New Year 2022!

    The past year 2021 brought us all both great and sad news, with the world still fighting the COVID pandemic. Gentoo is going strong however, and we are happy to present once more our review of the events of the last 12 months.Read on for new developers, exciting changes and improvements, and up-to-date numberson Gentoo development.
    Gentoo in numbers
    The number of commits to the main ::gentoo repository has once more clearly grown in 2021, from 104507 to 126920, i.e.,by 21%. While the number of commits by external contributors, 11775, has remained roughly constant, this number now distributes across 435 unique external authorscompared to 391 last year. We may have recruited some of the top contributors. ;)

    Contributions to GURU, our user-curated repository with a trusted user model, have increased enormously. We count4702 commits, up by 73% from 2725 in 2020. The number of contributors hasgrown even more, to 119, up by 116% from 55 in 2020. Please join us there and helppackaging the latest and greatest software!

    On our bugtracker bugs.gentoo.org, the number of new bug reports decreased slightly, with24056 bugs opened in 2021, compared to 25500 in 2020. However, more reports wereclosed this year, with 24076 bugs resolved in 2021, compared to 23500 in 2020.The ongoing tinderbox efforts as well as the overall high level of activity seem to be paying off!
    New developers
    In the past year 2021 we have gained an outstanding number of seven new Gentoo developers, much more than in recent years. In chronological order:

    John Helmert III (ajak):John was the first one to join in February. He’s focusing on the never-ending security work, wrangling bugs and issuing GLSAs, but also on developing the internal applications and infrastructure of the security team. We will hopefully have a fresh new GLSAmaker soon!

    Andrew Ammerlaan (andrewammerlaan):Andrew signed up in Mayand is well known for working on our scientific software stack (specifically physics and electronics), and also handlinguser contributions for both the Gentoo repository and the sci overlay. Beyond this he active in the GURU team and alsoin Python packaging.

    Ionen Wolkens (ionen):Ionen started in Juneand by now is active in many corners of Gentoo. His specific focus area, however, is games, games, games! In addition, he has also taken over one of our somewhat “special fun” packages, nvidia-drivers, and is theauthor of a whole set of development tools

    Florian Schmaus (flow):Also having started in June,Florian is busy with Java support, co-administrating the GURU overlay, and theproxy maintenance team. In addition he contributes to Erlang packaging - one of the more exotic programming languages present in Gentoo.

    Arthur Zamarin (arthurzam):Next, in August, came Arthur. He’s contributing a lot to our Python team, keeping the large number ofPython packages maintained there up-to-date. In addition, he recently joined several architecture teams, so wecan keep offering Gentoo for highly diverse hardware.

    Jakov Smolić (jsmolic):Our second new recruit in Augustwas Jakov. Master of odd jobs, he’s fixing bugs across the gentoo tree, solvingQA problems, and also weeding out old packages. Last but not least, he has also joined ourrecently renewed architecture team efforts.

    Maciej Barć (xgqt):Finally, Novemberbrought us Maciej. He’s coming from the mathematics corner, and consequently his areasof specialization are scientific and in particular mathematical packages, Scheme, but also, forexample, OCamML.



    Very sad news reached us in February.Kent Fredric (kentnl), a driving force behind our Perl and Rust efforts, died in a drowning accident - just when he had moved to Florida to start a new phase in his life. We will all remember his enthusiasm, helpfulness and love for detail, and wish his familyall the best.




    Featured changes
    Let’s look at the major changes and improvements of 2021 in Gentoo now.
    Packages
    Musl:Stage 3 tarballs for the alternative libc musl are now built using themain Gentoo repository only and have been published for several more arches andconfigurations. Work is ongoing to import more musl-related fixes and support patchesfrom the musl overlay, with the objective that musl-based installationseventually work out-of-the-box in Gentoo.

    libxcrypt: GNU glibc based installations have this year migrated from the deprecated internal crypt support to the external, new libxcrypt. With this we follow several other distributions; we gain modern algorithm support for one-way hashing of passwords and much easier bugfixing outside the glibc release cycle.

    contribution within the Summer 2021 Open Source Promotion Plan OSPP of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the openEuler community. Stay tuned for ROCm-enabled applications from Gentoo, such as Numba, CuPy, TensorFlow, and PyTorch.

    Python:In the meantime the default Python version in Gentoo has reached Python 3.9. Additionally we havealso Python 3.10 available stable, which means we’re fully up to date with upstream, andour Python has gained support for link-time and profile-guided optimization (LTO and PGO)during compilation.

    Themes Project: The Themes Project was created to maintain X11 themes and to unify their structure.

    Stable but up-to-date: As examples of the fast pace of Gentoo, our stable setcontains among other things gcc 11.2, glibc 2.33, binutils 2.37, LibreOffice 7.1.7, KDE Frameworks 5.88,Plasma 5.23.4, Gear 21.08.3, GNOME 40, and many more packages. If you want to gobleeding edge, then the very latest code releases are often available as testing packages.
    Architectures
    PPC64: The PowerPC profiles and downloads haveseen significant updates and enhancements. Several new ppc64 little-endian profiles (desktop, Gnome, …) have been added to the Gentoo repository. Our weekly updated downloads now include little-endian stages optimized for the POWER9 CPU series, and big- and little-endian hardened muslstage files.

    RISC-V:Support for RISC-V has improved enormously over the past year. Modern desktop environments such asKDE Plasma, Gnome, but also Lxde, Xfce4, and Enlightenment are fully available, as are otherpackages ranging from Rust to ZFS. Many more are in preparation. Gentoo is running nicely and is actively used on many of the first physical RISC-V systems. Stage filesare now published weekly for all supported ABI in both systemd and OpenRC variants. We have adapted the library directory paths to those used by other distributions for better binary compatibility.

    M68k:Gentoo on Motorola 68000 is back! We have regularly updated stages for download again, and keywording of packages is ongoing.

    LoongArch64: While this is not an official Gentoo project yet, we have already received first code contributionsfor Gentoo on LoongArch64, a Chinese development originally based on MIPS.
    Infrastructure
    Release Engineering: This year brought bigupdates of our build hardware as well as improvements in Catalyst.A new AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-core machine at Hetzner now handles our builds for amd64, x86,alpha, m68k, and riscv (the latter via qemu); a new ARM64 Ampere Neoverse-N1 80-coremachine provided by Equinix through the Works On Arm programhandles arm64 and arm; and two 16-core POWER9 machines provided by OSUOSL POWER Development Hosting handle ppc64 and ppc.This means we have had the capacity to add a large variety of builds, from openrc and systemd variantsto musl-based builds whereever possible.

    HPPA: We have received a donation of a fast HP Precision Architecture (PA-RISC) machine! It will be set up during the new year and significantly help bothhppa stabilization / keywording efforts and the release engineering builds.

    Internal modernization: Our infrastructure team has completed two important internal milestones: the migration from 15 years of cfengine-2 configuration management to puppet, and the update of aroughly 10 years old ganeti-2 cluster to a recent ganeti version. Both steps will help a lotwith managing our servers.
    Other news
    GKernelCI, the Gentoo kernel testing system (see also its dashboard page), reached its v2.0 milestone. New features includes: easier to deploy (thanks to docker), addition of new architectures under test(amd64 (tested with both gcc and clang toolchains), arm, arm64, ppc64, sparc), addition of kselftest check (kernel self test tool), and sharing results with KernelCI for supporting upstream Kernel testing and development.

    Online Gentoo workshops: A series of online workshops in German language started in 2021.The meetings take place in BBB every 2 months on the 3rd Saturday of themonth. The events have been very well received, and we also want to provide workshops in English starting on 2022-02-19. All events are listed on https://gentoo-ev.org/.

    The move to Libera Chat: After major changes in the governance of Freenode IRC, Gentooand many other open source projects moved their IRC presence to Libera Chat. This newIRC network, founded by former Freenode staffers, has in the meantime become the de-facto replacement of Freenode;we can certainly say that we feel very welcome and at home there and have a very strong presence with over 100Gentoo channels.

    Matrix presence:Although we continue to use IRC as our primary means of real-time communication, wehave also established presence on Matrix. In addition toGentoo developers overseeing a native Matrix channel dedicated to our distribution #gentoo:matrix.org, we now maintain a Matrix space #gentoo-linux:matrix.org whichincludes both the native channel and several bridged Libera Chat IRC channels.

    Experimental binary package hosting: First steps have started to also provide binary packagehosting on the Gentoo mirrors.
    Discontinued projects
    This year the following projects have been discontinued:

    Eudev: After several years, Gentoo maintainers decided that keepingthis barely modified fork of systemd-udev alive was not worth the effort, in particularsince also musl-based installations now work with the original.In the meantime, maintenance of eudev has been picked up by a cross-distributionteam, which means it may beavailable for longer.

    µClibc: Since µClibc-ng is mostly abandoned upstream, support for the µClibc profileswas dropped, and the package itself removed end of the year. Anyone interested inan alternative libc is encouraged to move to musl.

    Desktop Miscellaneous: We decided that “miscellaneous” is not really a useful way to group packages. The packages so far maintained by this project were reviewed and reassignedto dissolve the project.
    Thank you!
    Of course, if you look in detail, there has been much more news; we can’t cover everything here.We would like to thank all Gentoo developers and all who have submitted contributionsfor their relentless everyday Gentoo work. As a volunteer project, Gentoo could not exist without them.

    And now it’s time to break out the champagne - let’s celebrate the new year 2022, let’s hope for good days, and let’s make it even more productive!


Page last modified on December 29, 2006, at 08:35 PM