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Much improved MIPS and Alpha support in Gentoo Linux
Over the last years, MIPS and Alpha support in Gentoo has been slowing down, mostly due to a lack of volunteers keeping these architectures alive. Alas, not anymore! We’re happy to announce that thanks to renewed volunteer interest both arches have returned to the forefront of Gentoo Linux development, with a consistent dependency tree checked and enforced by our continuous integration system. Up-to-date stage builds and the accompanying binary packages are available for both, in the case of MIPS for all three ABI variants o32, n32, and n64 and for both big and little endian, and in the case of Alpha also with a bootable installation CD.
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KDE Plasma 6 upgrade for stable Gentoo Linux
Exciting news for stable Gentoo users: It’s time for the upgrade to the new “megaversion” of the KDE community desktop environment, KDE Plasma 6! Together with KDE Gear 24.05.2, where now most of the applications have been ported, and KDE Frameworks 6.5.0, the underlying library architecture, KDE Plasma 6.1.4 will be stabilized over the next days. The base libraries of Qt 6 are already available.
More technical information on the upgrade, which should be fairly seamless, as well as architecture-specific notes can be found in a repository news item. Enjoy!
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Gentoo Linux drops IA-64 (Itanium) support
Following the removal of IA-64 (Itanium) support in the Linux kernel and glibc, and subsequent discussions on our mailing list, as well as a vote by the Gentoo Council, Gentoo will discontinue all ia64 profiles and keywords. The primary reason for this decision is the inability of the Gentoo IA-64 team to support this architecture without kernel support, glibc support, and a functional development box (or even a well-established emulator). In addition, there have been only very few users interested in this type of hardware.
As also announced in a news item, in one month, i.e. in the first half of September 2024, all ia64 profiles will be removed, all ia64 keywords will be dropped from all packages, and all IA-64 related Gentoo bugs will be closed.
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Gentoo Linux becomes an SPI associated project
As of this March, Gentoo Linux has become an Associated Project of Software in the Public Interest, see also the formal invitation by the Board of Directors of SPI. Software in the Public Interest (SPI) is a non-profit corporation founded to act as a fiscal sponsor for organizations that develop open source software and hardware. It provides services such as accepting donations, holding funds and assets, … SPI qualifies for 501(c)(3) (U.S. non-profit organization) status. This means that all donations made to SPI and its supported projects are tax deductible for donors in the United States. Read on for more details…
Questions & Answers
Why become an SPI Associated Project?
Gentoo Linux, as a collective of software developers, is pretty good at being a Linux distribution. However, becoming a US federal non-profit organization would increase the non-technical workload.
The current Gentoo Foundation has bylaws restricting its behavior to that of a non-profit, is a recognized non-profit only in New Mexico, but a for-profit entity at the US federal level. A direct conversion to a federally recognized non-profit would be unlikely to succeed without significant effort and cost.
Finding Gentoo Foundation trustees to take care of the non-technical work is an ongoing challenge. Robin Johnson (robbat2), our current Gentoo Foundation treasurer, spent a huge amount of time and effort with getting bookkeeping and taxes in order after the prior treasurers lost interest and retired from Gentoo.
For these reasons, Gentoo is moving the non-technical organization overhead to Software in the Public Interest (SPI). As noted above, SPI is already now recognized at US federal level as a full-fleged non-profit 501(c)(3). It also handles several projects of similar type and size (e.g., Arch and Debian) and as such has exactly the experience and background that Gentoo needs.
What are the advantages of becoming an SPI Associated Project in detail?
Financial benefits to donors:
- tax deductions [1]
Financial benefits to Gentoo:
- matching fund programs [2]
- reduced organizational complexity
- reduced administration costs [3]
- reduced taxes [4]
- reduced fees [5]
- increased access to non-profit-only sponsorship [6]
Non-financial benefits to Gentoo:
- reduced organizational complexity, no “double-headed beast” any more
- less non-technical work required
[1] Presently, almost no donations to the Gentoo Foundation provide a tax benefit for donors anywhere in the world. Becoming a SPI Associated Project enables tax benefits for donors located in the USA. Some other countries do recognize donations made to non-profits in other jurisdictions and provide similar tax credits.
[2] This also depends on jurisdictions and local tax laws of the donor, and is often tied to tax deductions.
[3] The Gentoo Foundation currently pays $1500/year in tax preparation costs.
[4] In recent fiscal years, through careful budgetary planning on the part of the Treasurer and advice of tax professionals, the Gentoo Foundation has used depreciation expenses to offset taxes owing; however, this is not a sustainable strategy.
[5] Non-profits are eligible for reduced fees, e.g., of Paypal (savings of 0.9-1.29% per donation) and other services.
[6] Some sponsorship programs are only available to verified 501(c)(3) organizations
Can I still donate to Gentoo, and how?
Yes, of course, and please do so! For the start, you can go to SPI’s Gentoo page and scroll down to the Paypal and Click&Pledge donation links. More information and more ways will be set up soon. Keep in mind, donations to Gentoo via SPI are tax-deductible in the US!
In time, Gentoo will contact existing recurring donors, to aid transitions to SPI’s donation systems.
What will happen to the Gentoo Foundation?
Our intention is to eventually transfer the existing assets to SPI and dissolve the Gentoo Foundation. The precise steps needed on the way to this objective are still under discussion.
Does this affect in any way the European Gentoo e.V.?
No. Förderverein Gentoo e.V. will continue to exist independently. It is also recognized to serve public-benefit purposes (§ 52 Fiscal Code of Germany), meaning that donations are tax-deductible in the E.U.
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Gentoo x86-64-v3 binary packages available
End of December 2023 we already made our official announcement 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 to announce that there is also a separate package set using the extended x86-64-v3 ISA (i.e., microarchitecture level) available for the same software. If your hardware supports it, use it and enjoy the speed-up! Read on for more details…
Questions & Answers
How 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 --help Usage: ld.so [OPTION]... EXECUTABLE-FILE [ARGS-FOR-PROGRAM...] You have invoked 'ld.so', the program interpreter for dynamically-linked ELF programs. Usually, the program interpreter is invoked automatically when 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 replacex86-64withx86-64-v3. E.g., if you have so farsync-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 your own 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 onto it 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 instruction set was introduced rather late (2021).