Gentoo Linux

The Linux kernel has recently been facing a series of discovered privilege escalation vulnerabilities, starting with the Copy Fail vulnerability and followed by subsequent vulnerabilities in the same spirit (Dirty Frag, Fragnesia). This ... [More] development is part of a general trend where vulnerabilities are being found - and disclosed - faster than before. We expect it to continue, at least for the short-term. The Gentoo Linux Kernel and Distribution Kernel teams are doing their best to keep Gentoo kernels secure. This includes both packaging the latest upstream releases as soon as possible, and backporting additional vulnerability fixes or mitigations whenever they become available. As example, while upstream kernel releases are still vulnerable to Fragnesia, the respective Gentoo kernels feature fixes from day one. At the time of writing, all supported Gentoo kernels feature the latest Fragnesia v5 patch. Please expect more updates. We recommend exploring ways to automate upgrading your kernel. Please note that only sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel, sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-bin and sys-kernel/gentoo-sources packages are security-supported. The vanilla kernel packages are vulnerable at the moment. Other kernel packages may carry fixes, but they usually are slower to be updated. Additionally, we recommend running the latest kernel version (~arch or latest stable LTS), as upstream does not reliably backport security fixes to older versions. [Less]

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 ... [More] 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! [Less]

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 ... [More] , 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. [Less]

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 ... [More] 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 [email protected] 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: (…) [Less]

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 ... [More] 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. [Less]

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 ... [More] 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: $ 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 [email protected] 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!             [Less]

The Gentoo servers at OSUOSL are physically moving to a new data center. To ease the transition, the upload of stages and binary packages has been temporarily stopped or reduced in volume. Once the move has completed, all builds will resume as usual.

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 ... [More] 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). [Less]

Gentoo now has a presence on Codeberg, and contributions can be submitted for the Gentoo repository mirror at https://codeberg.org/gentoo/gentoo as an alternative to GitHub. Eventually also other git repositories will become available under ... [More] 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 [email protected]:repo/gentoo.git cd gentoo git remote add codeberg ssh://[email protected]/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. [Less]

Gentoo now has a presence on Codeberg, and contributions can be submitted for the Gentoo repository mirror at https://codeberg.org/gentoo/gentoo as an alternative to GitHub. Eventually also other git repositories will become available under ... [More] 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://[email protected]/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. [Less]