Planet Gentoo

Planet Gentoo
Welcome to Planet Gentoo,
an aggregation of Gentoo-related weblog articles written by Gentoo developers.
For a broader range of topics, you might be interested in Gentoo Universe.
April 02
2026
The Gentoo Big Forum Upgrade
Gentoo News (GentooNews)
April 02, 2026, 5:00
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!
The Gentoo Big Forum Upgrade
GentooNews (https://www.gentoo.org/feeds/news.xml
April 02, 2026, 5:00
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!
April 01
2026
Gentoo GNU/Hurd
Gentoo News (GentooNews)
April 01, 2026, 5:00
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 distfiles.gentoo.org/experimental/x86/hurd/hurd-i686-preview.qcow2.sig
$ wget 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: (…)
Gentoo GNU/Hurd
GentooNews (https://www.gentoo.org/feeds/news.xml
April 01, 2026, 5:00
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
Gentoo News (GentooNews)
April 01, 2026, 5:00
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.
Supercharging our forums with AI
GentooNews (https://www.gentoo.org/feeds/news.xml
April 01, 2026, 5:00
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.
February 26
2026
In Memory of Hans de Graaff
Gentoo News (GentooNews)
February 26, 2026, 6:00
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).
In Memory of Hans de Graaff
GentooNews (https://www.gentoo.org/feeds/news.xml
February 26, 2026, 6:00
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).
February 16
2026
Gentoo on Codeberg
Gentoo News (GentooNews)
February 16, 2026, 6:00
Gentoo now has a presence on Codeberg, and contributions can be submitted for the Gentoo
repository mirror at 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 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="$title"
and the PR should be created automatically. To push additional
commits, repeat the above command - be sure that the same topic is
used. If you wish to force-push updates (because you’re amending
commits), add “-o force-push=true” to the above command.
More documentation can be found on our wiki.
Gentoo on Codeberg
GentooNews (https://www.gentoo.org/feeds/news.xml
February 16, 2026, 6:00
Gentoo now has a presence on
Codeberg
, and contributions can be submitted for the Gentoo
repository mirror at
as an alternative to GitHub.
Eventually also other git repositories will become available under the Codeberg Gentoo organization.
This is part of the gradual mirror migration away from GitHub, as already mentioned in the
2025 end-of-year review
Codeberg is a site based on
Forgejo
, maintained by a dedicated
non-profit organization
and located in Berlin, Germany. Thanks to everyone who has helped make this move possible!
These mirrors are for convenience for contribution and we continue to host our own
repositories, just like we did while using GitHub mirrors for ease of
contribution too.
Submitting pull requests
If you wish to submit pull requests on Codeberg, it is recommended to
use the
AGit approach
as it is more space efficient and does not
require you to maintain a fork of gentoo.git on your own Codeberg
profile. To set it up, clone the upstream URL and check out a branch
locally:
git clone https://anongit.gentoo.org/git/repo/gentoo.git
cd gentoo
git remote add codeberg ssh://git@codeberg.org/gentoo/gentoo
git checkout -b my-new-fixes
Once you’re ready to create your PR:
git push codeberg HEAD:refs/for/master -o topic="$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
January 05
2026
2025 in retrospect & happy new year 2026!
Gentoo News (GentooNews)
January 05, 2026, 6:00
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.
2025 in retrospect & happy new year 2026!
GentooNews (https://www.gentoo.org/feeds/news.xml
January 05, 2026, 6:00
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.
December 26
2025
FOSDEM 2026
Gentoo News (GentooNews)
December 26, 2025, 6:00
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.
FOSDEM 2026
GentooNews (https://www.gentoo.org/feeds/news.xml
December 26, 2025, 6:00
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.
April 30
2025
Urgent - OSU Open Source Lab needs your help
Gentoo News (GentooNews)
April 30, 2025, 5:00
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.
Urgent - OSU Open Source Lab needs your help
GentooNews (https://www.gentoo.org/feeds/news.xml
April 30, 2025, 5:00
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.
February 20
2025
Bootable Gentoo QCOW2 disk images - ready for the cloud!
Gentoo News (GentooNews)
February 20, 2025, 6:00
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.
Bootable Gentoo QCOW2 disk images - ready for the cloud!
GentooNews (https://www.gentoo.org/feeds/news.xml
February 20, 2025, 6:00
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.
February 01
2025
Tinderbox shutdown
Agostino Sarubbo (ago)
February 01, 2025, 7:08
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.
Tinderbox shutdown
ago (ago
February 01, 2025, 7:08
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.
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