Gentoo Linux

In Memory of Kent “kentnl” Fredric

Fri, 12 Feb 2021 00:00:00 -0600

Gentoo mourns the sudden loss of Kent Fredric, also known to us by his IRC handle kent\n. He passed away following a tragic accident a few days ago.

Kent was an active member of the Gentoo community for many years. He tirelessly managed Gentoo’s Perl support, and was active in the Rust project as well as in many other corners. We all remember him as an enthusiastic, bright person, with lots of eye for detail and constant willingness to help out and improve things. On behalf of the world-wide Gentoo community, our heartfelt condolences go out to his family and friends.

Please join us in remembering Kent on the Gentoo forums.

2020 in retrospect & happy new year 2021!

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 00:00:00 -0600

Happy New Year 2021! Due to the COVID pandemic, 2020 was a year unlike any other, and this has also impacted many open source projects. Nevertheless, at Gentoo we have made some great strides forward. While we now start into 2021 with fresh energy (and maybe soon antibodies), let’s also take a look back. We’re happy to share with our community the most exciting news of the past 12 months – including numbers on Gentoo activity, our new developers, and featured changes and improvements!

Gentoo in numbers

2020 has featured a major increase in commits to the ::gentoo repository, and especially commits from non-developers. The overall number of commits has grown from 73400 to 104500 (by 42%), while the number of commits made by non-developers has grown from 5700 (8% of total) to 11000 (10.5% of total). The latter group has featured 333 unique authors in 2019, and 391 in 2020.

The ::guru repository has thrived in 2020. While 2019 left it with merely 7 contributors and a total of 86 commits, 2020 has featured 55 different contributors and 2725 commits. GURU is a user-curated repository with a trusted user model. Come join us!

There was also a major increase in Bugzilla activity. 2020 featured almost 25500 bugs reported, compared to 15000 in 2019. This is probably largely thanks to Agostino Sarubbo’s new tinderboxing effort. The total number of bugs closed in 2020 was 23500, compared to 15000 in 2019.

New developers

We’ve finished 2020 with three significant additions to the Gentoo family (in chronological order):

Max Magorsch (arzano)

Max joined us in February to help out with Gentoo Infrastructure. Since then, he already did tons of work. Just to list a few things, he has redesigned and modernized the Gentoo websites and rewritten packages.gentoo.org into the super cool form we have today.
Sam James (sam)

Sam joined us in July, and has contributed to a lot of different projects since. He is known as an active member of the Security team and multiple arch teams, as well as someone who fixes lots of bugs in different packages.
Stephan Hartmann (sultan)

Stephan joined us in September, and immediately started working on our Chromium-related packages. He has pushed commits to upstream Chromium; hopefully he’ll deal with all the specific problems that come up in Gentoo here. Thanks to him we also have finally caught up with Windows, offering our users a packaged version of Microsoft Edge.

Featured changes

The following major changes and improvements have happened in 2020:

Packages

Distribution Kernels: Gentoo now supports building and installing kernels entirely via the package manager. The new kernel packages also come with an (optional) stock configuration based on well-tested Fedora kernels, to ease the entry barrier and maintenance effort of Gentoo systems.
Wayland: Wayland support in Gentoo has progressed greatly, making it possible to run an Xorg-free desktop. Wayland is supported with large desktop environments such as KDE Plasma and GNOME, as well as with lightweight alternatives such as Sway and Wayfire. The latter makes it also possible to use Wayland to a large extent without resorting to XWayland.
Lua: A new framework has been created that permits multiple versions of Lua to be installed side-by-side. The vast majority of ~arch packages have already been migrated to this framework. This way, we have finally been able to unmask new (slotted!) Lua versions.
Python: We have managed to almost withdraw Python 2.7 from Gentoo, and upgrade the default to Python 3.8. Python 2.7 is still available as a build-time dependency for a few packages. We have additionally patched all the vulnerabilities known from later versions of Python.

Architectures

ARM64: ARM64 (AArch64) support has been elevated to stable status and is no longer experimental. The ARM64 project now provides automatically generated stage3 files, and is usually one of the fastest arch teams to test packages. We have worked to bring more packages to ARM64 and make it more feasible to run a full desktop!
PPC64: KDE Plasma is now available on PPC64, thanks to extensive testing and keywording efforts by Georgy Yakovlev.
RISC-V: Work on RISC-V support has started, with particular focus on the riscv64 architecture. The RISC-V project provides stage3 files and stable profiles for the soft-float (rv64imac/lp64) and hard-float (rv64gc/lp64d) ABIs, in both systemd and OpenRC variants. The arch team has managed to run Xorg already!
Prefix: Gentoo Prefix is once again capable of bootstrapping on the latest macOS releases, and work is underway to modernise prefix-specific ebuilds and merge them back into the main tree - this way ensuring that users get the latest software and that maintenance burden is reduced.
Android: The Gentoo Android project has released a new 64bit Android prefix tarball, featuring gcc-10.1.0, binutils-2.34 and glibc-2.31 in your pocket!

Infrastructure

packages.gentoo.org: The packages website has received many improvements towards being a central source of information on Gentoo packages. It now shows the results of QA checks, bugs, pull requests referencing a package, and a maintainer dashboard indicating stabilization candidates and outdated versions (according to Repology). Additionally, the display can be configured for your personal preferences!
Bugzilla: The Infrastructure team has implemented a major improvement to Gentoo Bugzilla performance. The database has been migrated to a newer database cluster, and the backend has been switched to mod_perl.
CI / Tinderbox: A second active tinderboxing (build testing) effort has been started, resulting in more bugs being detected and fixed early. This also includes running a variety of QA checks, as well as minimal environment builds that are helpful in detecting missing dependencies.

Other news

HPC adoption: The Prefix Project has published a conference proceeding on a case study of Gentoo in high energy physics. Gentoo also sees wider adoption in the HPC community such as Compute Canada and EESSI.

Discontinued projects

While Gentoo would like to support as much as our users wish for, we could not manage to continue all of the projects we’ve started in the past. With limited resources, we had to divert our time and effort from projects showing little promise and activity. The most important projects discontinued in 2020 were:

Architectures: Alpha and IA64 keywords were reduced to ~arch (i.e. unstable/testing only). HPPA stable keywords were limited to the most important packages only. SH (SuperH) was removed entirely. With very small number of users of these architectures, our arch teams decided that the effort in maintaining them is too great. In case of SuperH, our last available hardware died.
LibreSSL: By the end of 2020, we have decided to discontinue support for LibreSSL. With little to no support from various upstream projects, the effort necessary to maintain package compatibility exceeded the gain, especially given that OpenSSL has made a lot of progress since the forking point.

Thank you!

We can here describe only a few major items, and these cover by far not all that is going on. We would like to thank all Gentoo developers for their relentless everyday Gentoo work. While they are often not recognized for this work, Gentoo could not exist without them. Cheers, and let’s make 2021 even more productive!

Distribution kernel for Gentoo

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 00:00:00 -0500

The Gentoo Distribution Kernel project is excited to announce that our new Linux Kernel packages are ready for a wide audience! The project aims to create a better Linux Kernel maintenance experience by providing ebuilds that can be used to configure, compile, and install a kernel entirely through the package manager as well as prebuilt binary kernels. We are currently shipping three kernel packages:

sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel - providing a kernel with genpatches applied, built using the package manager with either a distribution default or a custom configuration
sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-bin - prebuilt version of gentoo-kernel, saving time on compiling
sys-kernel/vanilla-kernel - providing a vanilla (unmodified) upstream kernel

All the packages install the kernel as part of the package installation process — just like the rest of your system! More information can be found in the Gentoo Handbook and on the Distribution Kernel project page. Happy hacking!

New Packages site features

Wed, 09 Sep 2020 00:00:00 -0500

Our packages.gentoo.org site has recently received major feature upgrades thanks to the continued efforts of Gentoo developer Max Magorsch (arzano). Highlights include:

Tracking Gentoo bugs of specific packages (Bugzilla integration)
Tracking available upstream package versions (Repology integration)
QA check warnings for specific packages (QA reports integration)

Additionally, an experimental command-line client for packages.gentoo.org named “pgo” is in preparation, specifically also for our users with accesssibility needs.

Portage 3.0 stabilized

Sat, 05 Sep 2020 00:00:00 -0500

We have good news! Gentoo’s Portage project has recently stabilized version 3.0 of the package manager.

What’s new? Well, this third version of Portage removes support for Python 2.7, which has been an ongoing effort across the main Gentoo repository by Gentoo’s Python project during the 2020 year (see this blog post).

In addition, due to a user provided patch, updating to the latest version of Portage can vastly speed up dependency calculations by around 50-60%. We love to see our community engaging in our software! For more details, see this Reddit post from the community member who provided the patch. Stay healthy and keep cooking with Gentoo!

Gentoo on Android 64-bit release

Tue, 07 Jul 2020 00:00:00 -0500

Gentoo Project Android is pleased to announce a new 64-bit release of the stage3 Android prefix tarball. This is a major release after 2.5 years of development, featuring gcc-10.1.0, binutils-2.34 and glibc-2.31. Enjoy Gentoo in your pocket!

Official Gentoo Docker images

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 00:00:00 -0500

Did you already know that we have official Gentoo Docker images available on Docker Hub?! The most popular one is based on the amd64 stage. Images are created automatically; you can peek at the source code for this on our git server. Thanks to the Gentoo Docker project!

200th Gentoo Council meeting

Sun, 10 May 2020 00:00:00 -0500

Way back in 2005, the reorganization of Gentoo led to the formation of the Gentoo Council, a steering body elected annually by the Gentoo developers. Forward 15 years, and today we had our 200th meeting! (No earth shaking decisions were taken today though.) The logs and summaries of all meetings can be read online on the archive page.

Reviving Gentoo Bugday

Fri, 08 May 2020 00:00:00 -0500

Reviving an old tradition, the next Gentoo Bugday will take place on Saturday 2020-06-06. Let’s contribute to Gentoo and fix bugs! We will focus on two topics in particular:

Adding or improving documentation on the Gentoo wiki
Fixing packages that fail with -fno-common (bug #705764)

Join us on channel #gentoo-bugday, freenode IRC, for real-time help. See you on 2020-06-06!

FOSDEM 2020

Fri, 03 Jan 2020 00:00:00 -0600

It’s FOSDEM time again! Join us at Université libre de Bruxelles, Campus du Solbosch, in Brussels, Belgium. This year’s FOSDEM 2020 will be held on February 1st and 2nd.

Our developers will be happy to greet all open source enthusiasts at our Gentoo stand in building K where we will also celebrate 20 years compiling! Visit this year’s wiki page to see who’s coming.