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1. Urgent - OSU Open Source Lab needs your help

   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.

2. Bootable Gentoo QCOW2 disk images - ready for the cloud!

   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.

3. 2024 in retrospect & happy new year 2025!

   Happy New Year 2025! Once again, a lot has happened over the past months, in Gentoo and otherwise. Our fireworks were a bit early this year with the stabilization of GCC 14 in November, after a huge amount of preparations and bug fixing via the Modern C initiative. A lot of other programming language ecosystems also saw significant improvements. As always here we’re going to revisit all the exciting news from our favourite Linux distribution.

   Gentoo in numbers

   The number of commits to the main ::gentoo repository has remained at an overall high level in 2024, with a 2.4% increase from 121000 to 123942. The number of commits by external contributors has grown strongly from 10708 to 12812, now across 421 unique external authors.

   The importance of GURU, our user-curated repository with a trusted user model, as entry point for potential developers, is clearly increasing as well. We have had 7517 commits in 2024, a strong growth from 5045 in 2023. The number of contributors to GURU has increased a lot as well, from 158 in 2023 to 241 in 2024. Please join us there and help packaging the latest and greatest software. That’s the ideal preparation for becoming a Gentoo developer!

   Activity has picked up speed on the Gentoo bugtracker bugs.gentoo.org, where we’ve had 26123 bug reports created in 2024, compared to 24795 in 2023. The number of resolved bugs shows the same trend, with 25946 in 2024 compared to 22779 in 2023!

   New developers

   In 2024 we have gained two new Gentoo developers. They are in chronological order:

   1. Matt Jolly (kangie): Matt joined us already in February from Brisbane, Australia - now finally pushing his commits himself, after already taking care of, e.g., Chromium for over half a year. In work life a High Performance Computing systems administrator, in his free time he enjoys playing with his animals, restoring retro computing equipment and gaming consoles (or using them), brewing beer, the beach, or the local climbing gym.

   2. Eli Schwartz (eschwartz): In July, we were able to welcome Eli Schwartz from the USA as new Gentoo developer. A bookworm and big fan of Python, and also an upstream maintainer for the Meson Build System, Eli caught the Linux bug already in highschool. Quoting him, “asking around for recommendations on distro I was recommended either Arch or Gentoo. Originally I made a mistake ;)” … We’re glad this got fixed now!

   Featured changes and news

   Let’s now look at the major improvements and news of 2024 in Gentoo.

   Distribution-wide Initiatives

   • SPI associated project: As of March 2024, Gentoo Linux has become an Associated Project of Software in the Public Interest (SPI). 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, … and 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. The intent behind becoming an SPI associated project is to gradually wind down operations of the Gentoo Foundation and transfer its assets to SPI.

   • GCC 14 stabilization: After a huge amount of work to identify and fix bugs and working with upstreams to modernize the overall source code base, see also the Modern C porting initiative, GCC 14 was finally stabilized in November 2024. Same as Clang 16, GCC 14 by default drops support for several long-deprecated and obsolete language constructs, turning decades-long warnings on bad code into fatal errors.

   • Link time optimization (LTO): Lots of progress has been made supporting LTO all across the Gentoo repository.

   • 64bit time_t for 32bit architectures: Various preparations have begun to keep our 32-bit arches going beyond the year 2038. While the GNU C library is ready for that, the switch to a wider time_t data type is an ABI break between userland programs and libraries and needs to be approached carefully, in particular for us as a source-based distribution. Experimental profiles as well as a migration tool are available by now, and will be announced more widely at some point in 2025.

   • New 23.0 profiles: A new profile version 23.0, i.e. a collection of presets and configurations, has become the default setting; the old profiles are deprecated and will be removed in June 2025. The 23.0 profiles fix a lot of internal inconsistencies; for the user, they bring more toolchain hardening (specifically, CET on amd64 and non-lazy runtime binding) and optimization (e.g., packed relative reolcations where supported) by default.

   • Expanded binary package coverage: The binary package coverage for amd64 has been expanded a lot, with, e.g., different use-flag combinations, Python support up to version 3.13, and additional large leaf packages beyond stable as for example current GCC snapshots, all for baseline x86-64 and for x86-64-v3. At the moment, the mirrors hold over 60GByte of package data for amd64 alone.

   • Two additional merchandise stores: We have licensed two additional official merchandise stores, both based in Europe: FreeWear (clothing, mugs, stickers; located in Spain) and BadgeShop (Etsy, Ebay; badges, stickers; located in Romania).

   • Handbook improvements and editor role: The Gentoo handbook has once again been significantly improved (though there is always still more work to be done). We now have special Gentoo handbook editor roles assigned, which makes the handbook editing effectively much more community friendly. This way, a lot of longstanding issues have been fixed, making installing Gentoo easier for everyone.

   • Event presence: At the Free and Open Source Software Conference (FrOSCon) 2024, visitors enjoyed a full weekend of hands-on Gentoo workshops. The workshops covered a wide range of topics, from first installation to ebuild maintenance. We also offered mugs, stickers, t-shirts, and of course the famous self-compiled buttons.

   • Online workshops: Our German support, Gentoo e.V., is grateful to the inspiring speakers of the 6 online workshops in 2024 on various Gentoo topics in German and English. We are looking forward to more exciting events in 2025.

   • Ban on NLP AI tools: Due to serious concerns with current AI and LLM systems, the Gentoo Council has decided to embrace the value of human contributions and adopt the following motion: “It is expressly forbidden to contribute to Gentoo any content that has been created with the assistance of Natural Language Processing artificial intelligence tools. This motion can be revisited, should a case been made over such a tool that does not pose copyright, ethical and quality concerns.”

   Architectures

   • MIPS and Alpha fully supported again: After the big drive to improve Alpha support last year, now we’ve taken care of MIPS keywording all across the Gentoo repository. 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.

   • 32bit RISC-V now available: Installation stages for 32bit RISC-V systems (rv32) are now available for download, both using hard-float and soft-float ABI, and both using glibc and musl.

   • End of IA-64 (Itanium) support: Following the removal of IA-64 (Itanium) support in the Linux kernel and in glibc, we have dropped all ia64 profiles and keywords.

   Packages

   • Slotted Rust: The Rust compiler is now slotted, allowing multiple versions to be installed in parallel. This allows us to finally support packages that have a maximum bounded Rust dependency and don’t compile successfully with a newer Rust (yes, that exists!), or ensure that packages use Rust and LLVM versions that fit together (e.g., firefox or chromium).

   • Reworked LLVM handling: In conjunction with this, the LLVM ebuilds and eclasses have been reworked so packages can specify which LLVM versions they support and dependencies are generated accordingly. The eclasses now provide much cleaner LLVM installation information to the build systems of packages, and therefore, e.g., also fix support for cross-compilation

   • Python: In the meantime the default Python version in Gentoo has reached Python 3.12. Additionally we have also Python 3.13 available stable - again we’re fully up to date with upstream.

   • Zig rework and slotting: An updated eclass and ebuild framework for the Zig programming language has been committed that hooks into the ZBS or Zig Build System, allows slotting of Zig versions, allows Zig libraries to be depended on, and even provides some experimental cross-compilation support.

   • Ada support: We finally have Ada support for just about every architecture. Yay!

   • Slotted Guile: The last but not least language that received the slotting treatment has been Guile, with three new eclasses, such that now Guile 1, 2, and 3 and their reverse dependencies can coexist in a Gentoo installation.

   • TeX Live 2023 and 2024: Catching up with our backlog, the packaging of TeX Live has been refreshed; TeX Live 2023 is now marked stable and TeX Live 2024 is marked testing.

   • DTrace 2.0: The famous tracing tool DTrace has come to Gentoo! All required kernel options are already enabled in the newest stable Gentoo distribution kernel; if you are compiling manually, the DTrace ebuild will inform you about required configuration changes. Internally, DTrace 2.0 for Linux builds on the BPF engine of the Linux kernel, so the build installs a gcc that outputs BPF code (which, btw, also is very useful for systemd).

   • KDE Plasma 6 upgrade: Stable Gentoo Linux has upgraded to the new major version of the KDE community desktop environment, KDE Plasma 6. As of end of 2024, in Gentoo stable we have KDE Gear 24.08.3, KDE Frameworks 6.7.0, and KDE Plasma 6.2.4. As always, Gentoo testing follows the newest upstream releases (and using the KDE overlay you can even install from git sources). In the course of KDE package maintenance we have over the past months and years contributed over 240 upstream backports to KDE’s Qt5PatchCollection.

   • Microgram Ramdisk: We have added µgRD (or ugrd) as a lightweight initramfs generator alternative to dracut. As a side effect of this our installkernel mechanism has gained support for arbitrary initramfs generators.

   Physical and Software Infrastructure

   • Mailing list archives: archives.gentoo.org, our mailing list archive, is back, now with a backend based on public-inbox. Many thanks to upstream there for being very helpful; we were even able to keep all historical links to archived list e-mails working.

   • Ampere Altra Max development server: Arm Ltd. and specifically its Works on Arm team has sent us a fast Ampere Altra Max server to support Gentoo development. With 96 Armv8.2+ 64bit cores, 256 GByte of RAM, and 4 TByte NVMe storage, it is now hosted together with some of our other hardware at OSU Open Source Lab.

   Finances of the Gentoo Foundation

   • Income: The Gentoo Foundation took in approximately $20,800 in fiscal year 2024; the dominant part (over 80%) consists of individual cash donations from the community.

   • Expenses: Our expenses in 2024 were, as split into the usual three categories, operating expenses (for services, fees, …) $7,900, only minor capital expenses (for bought assets), and depreciation expenses (value loss of existing assets) $13,300.

   • Balance: We have about $105,000 in the bank as of July 1, 2024 (which is when our fiscal year 2024 ends for accounting purposes). The draft finanical report for 2024 is available on the Gentoo Wiki.

   • Transition to SPI: With the move of our accounts to SPI, see above, the web pages for individual cash donations now direct the funds to SPI earmarked for Gentoo, both for one time and recurrent donations. Donors of ongoing recurrent donations will be contacted and asked to re-arrange over the upcoming months.

   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.

4. FOSDEM 2025

   

   It’s FOSDEM time again! Join us at Université Libre de Bruxelles, Campus du Solbosch, in Brussels, Belgium. The upcoming FOSDEM 2025 will be held on February 1st and 2nd 2025. Our developers will be happy to greet all open source enthusiasts at our Gentoo stand (exact location still to be announced), which we will share this year with then Gentoo-based Flatcar Container Linux. Of course there’s also the chance to celebrate 25 years of compiling! Visit this year’s wiki page to see who’s coming and for more practical information.

5. DTrace 2.0 for Gentoo

   

   The real, mythical DTrace comes to Gentoo! Need to dynamically trace your kernel or userspace programs, with rainbows, ponies, and unicorns - and all entirely safely and in production?! Gentoo is now ready for that! Just emerge dev-debug/dtrace and you’re all set. All required kernel options are already enabled in the newest stable Gentoo distribution kernel; if you are compiling manually, the DTrace ebuild will inform you about required configuration changes. Internally, DTrace 2.0 for Linux builds on the BPF engine of the Linux kernel, so don’t be surprised if the awesome cross-compilation features of Gentoo are used to install a gcc that outputs BPF code (which, btw, also comes in very handy for sys-apps/systemd).

   Documentation? Sure, there’s lots of it. You can start with our DTrace wiki page, the DTrace for Linux page on GitHub, or the original documentation for Illumos. Enjoy!