News

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 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.

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.

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 [email protected] on your host.

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.

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).

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 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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!

We’re very happy to announce that 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. The machine will be a clear boost to our future arm64 (aarch64) and arm (32bit) support, via installation stage builds and binary packages, architecture testing of Gentoo packages, as well as our close work with upstream projects such as GCC and glibc. Thank you!

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. Not anymore however! 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.

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!

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.

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…

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…

A Happy New Year 2024 to all of you! We hope you enjoyed the fireworks; we tried to contribute to these too with the binary package news just before new year! That’s not the only thing in Gentoo that was new in 2023 though; as in the previous years, let’s look back and give it a review.

You probably all know Gentoo Linux as your favourite source-based distribution. Did you know that our package manager, Portage, already for years also has support for binary packages, and that source- and binary-based package installations can be freely mixed?

To speed up working with slow hardware and for overall convenience, we’re now also offering binary packages for download and direct installation! For most architectures, this is limited to the core system and weekly updates - not so for amd64 and arm64 however. There we’ve got a stunning >20 GByte of packages on our mirrors, from LibreOffice to KDE Plasma and from Gnome to Docker. Gentoo stable, updated daily. Enjoy! And read on for more details!

Do you want to learn more about Gentoo and contribute to your favourite free software project?! Once again, now for the 11th time, we have been accepted as a mentoring organization for this year’s Google Summer of Code!

The GSoC is an excellent opportunity for gaining real-world experience in software design and making oneself known in the broader open source community. It also looks great on a resume. Some initial project ideas can be found here, but new projects ideas are also welcome. For new projects time is of the essence: they have to be worked out, discussed with the mentors, and submitted before the April 4th deadline. It is strongly recommended that contributors refine new project ideas with a mentor before proposing the idea formally.

Potential GSoC contributors are encouraged to e-mail the GSoC admins with their name, IRC nickname, and the desired project, and discuss ideas in the #gentoo-soc IRC channel on Libera Chat. Further information can be found on the Gentoo GSoC 2023 wiki page. Those with unanswered questions should also not hesitate to contact the Summer of Code mentors via their mailing list.

A quite late Happy New Year 2023 to all of you!

Once again with 2022 an eventful year has passed, and Gentoo is still alive and kicking! 2023 already started some time ago and some of us have even already been meeting up and networking at FOSDEM 2023. Still, we are happy to present once more a review of the Gentoo news of the past year 2022. Read on for new developers, distribution wide initiatives and improvements, up-to-date numbers on Gentoo development, tales from the infrastructure, and all the fresh new packages you can emerge now.

Finally, after a long break, it’s FOSDEM time again! Join us at Université Libre de Bruxelles, Campus du Solbosch, in Brussels, Belgium. This year’s FOSDEM 2023 will be held on February 4th and 5th.

Our developers will be happy to greet all open source enthusiasts at our Gentoo stand in building H, level 1! Visit this year’s wiki page to see who’s coming.

After a long break, we now have again a weekly LiveGUI ISO image for amd64 available! The download, suitable for an USB stick or a dual-layer DVD, boots directly into KDE Plasma and comes with a ton of up-to-date software. This ranges from office applicactions such as LibreOffice, Inkscape, and Gimp all the way to many system administrator tools.

Now, we need your help! Let’s make this the coolest and most beautiful Linux live image ever. We’re calling for submissions of artwork, themes, actually anything from a desktop background to a boot manager animation, on the topic of Gentoo! The winning entry will be added as default setting to the official LiveGUI images, and also be available for download and installation.

Do you want to learn more about Gentoo and contribute to your favourite free software project?! Once again, now for the 10th time, we have been accepted as a mentoring organization for this year’s Google Summer of Code!

The GSoC is an excellent opportunity for gaining real-world experience in software design and making oneself known in the broader open source community. It also looks great on a resume. Some initial project ideas can be found here, but new projects ideas are also welcome. For new projects time is of the essence: they have to be worked out, discussed with the mentors, and submitted before the April 19th deadline. It is strongly recommended that contributors refine new project ideas with a mentor before proposing the idea formally.

Potential GSoC contributors are encouraged to e-mail the GSoC admins with their name, IRC nickname, and the desired project, and discuss ideas in the #gentoo-soc IRC channel on Libera Chat. Further information can be found on the Gentoo GSoC 2022 wiki page. Those with unanswered questions should also not hesitate to contact the Summer of Code mentors via their mailing list.

We have simplified the format of the downloadable file (i.e. stage 3 and iso image) signatures. Now, each of these files is accompanied by a detached GnuPG signature where the file itself is signed. The signing key remains unchanged; see our web page on release media signatures for the fingerprints.

An unsigned DIGESTS file remains available as well.

Happy New Year 2022!

The past year 2021 brought us all both great and sad news, with the world still fighting the COVID pandemic. Gentoo is going strong however, and we are happy to present once more our review of the events of the last 12 months. Read on for new developers, exciting changes and improvements, and up-to-date numbers on Gentoo development.

Due to an unexpected breakage on our database servers, several Gentoo websites are currently down. In particular, this includes Forums, Wiki, and Bugzilla. Please visit our Infrastructure status page for real-time monitoring and eventual outage notices.

Update, Dec 5, 2021: The outage, apparently caused by a subtle bug in the depths of MariaDB and Galera, should mostly be over. Our infrastructure team is watching the database servers closely though.

Following some technical reorganization and the introduction of new hardware, the Gentoo Release Engineering team is happy to offer a much-expanded set of stage files for download. Highlights are in particular the inclusion of musl-based stages and of POWER9-optimized ppc64 downloads, as well as additional systemd-based variants for many architectures.

Today (2021-05-26) a large number of Gentoo channels have been hijacked by Freenode staff, including channels that were not yet migrated to Libera.chat. We cannot perceive this otherwise than as an open act of hostility and we have effectively left Freenode.

Please note that at this point the only official Gentoo IRC channels, as well as developer accounts, can be found on Libera Chat.

2021-06-15 update

As a part of an unannounced switch to a different IRC daemon, the Freenode staff has removed all channel and nickname registrations. Since many Gentoo developers have left Freenode permanently and are not interested in registering their nicknames again, this opens up further possibilities of malicious impersonation.

The Gentoo Council held an emergency single agenda item meeting today. At this meeting, we have decided to move the official IRC presence of Gentoo to the Libera Chat IRC network. We intend to have this move complete at latest by 13/June/2021. A full log of the meeting will be available for download soon.

At the moment it is unclear whether we will retain any presence on Freenode at all; we urge all users of the #gentoo channel namespace to move to Libera Chat immediately. IRC channel names will (mostly) remain identical. You will be able to recognize Gentoo developers on Libera Chat by their IRC cloak in the usual form gentoo/developer/*. All other technical aspects will feel rather familiar to all of us as well. Detailed instructions for setting up various IRC clients can be found on the help pages of the IRC network.

According to the information published recently, there have been major changes in the way the Freenode IRC network is administered. This has resulted in a number of staff members raising concerns about the new administration and/or resigning. A large number of open source projects have already announced the transition to other IRC networks, or are actively discussing it.

It is not yet clear whether and how these changes will affect Gentoo. We are observing as the situation develops. It is possible that we will decide to move the official Gentoo channels to another network in the best interest of our users. At the same time, we realize that such a move will be an inconvenience to them.

At the same time, it has came to our attention that certain individuals have been using the situation to impersonate Gentoo developers on other IRC networks. The official Gentoo developers can be identified on Freenode by their gentoo/developer cloak. If we move to another network, we will announce claiming a respective cloak.

Please check this page for future updates.

More information on the Freenode situation can be found at:

• Christian (Fuchs)’s Freenode resignation
• @freenodestaff tweet
• Open Letter On freenode’s independence
• Andrew Lee, We grew up with IRC. Let’s take it further.

2021-05-22 update

The Gentoo Council will be meeting tomorrow (Sunday, 2021-05-23) at 19:00 UTC to discuss the problem and the possible solutions.

The Gentoo Group Contacts team has been taking steps in order to ensure readiness for the most likely options.

We are glad to welcome Leo and Mark to the Google Summer of Code 2021.

Mark will work on improving Catalyst, our release building tool. Leo will work on improving our Java packaging support, with a special focus on big-data and scientific software.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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 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!

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!

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 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!

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.

The ARM64 project is pleased to announce that all ARM64 profiles are now stable.

While our developers and users have contributed significantly in this accomplishment, we must also thank our Packet sponsor for their contribution. Providing the Gentoo developer community with access to bare metal hardware has accelerated progress in achieving the stabilization of the ARM64 profiles.

The SKS keyserver network has been a victim of certificate poisoning attack lately. The OpenPGP verification used for repository syncing is protected against the attack. However, our users can be affected when using GnuPG directly. In this post, we would like to shortly summarize what the attack is, what we did to protect Gentoo against it and what can you do to protect your system.

The Gentoo Foundation has partnered with Nitrokey to equip all Gentoo developers with free Nitrokey Pro 2 devices. Gentoo developers will use the Nitrokey devices to store cryptographic keys for signing of git commits and software packages, GnuPG keys, and SSH accounts.

GNOME 3.30 is now available in Gentoo Linux testing branch. Starting with this release, GNOME on Gentoo once again works with OpenRC, in addition to the usual systemd option. This is achieved through the elogind project, a standalone logind implementation based on systemd code, which is currently maintained by a fellow Gentoo user. Gentoo would like to thank Mart Raudsepp (leio), Gavin Ferris, and all others working on this for their contributions. More information can be found in Mart’s blog post.

It’s FOSDEM time again! Join us at Université libre de Bruxelles, Campus du Solbosch, in Brussels, Belgium. This year’s FOSDEM 2019 will be held on February 2nd and 3rd.

Our developers will be happy to greet all open source enthusiasts at our Gentoo stand in building K. Visit this year’s wiki page to see who’s coming. So far eight developers have specified their attendance, with most likely many more on the way!

ANSSI, the National Cybersecurity Agency of France, has released the sources of CLIP OS, that aims to build a hardened, multi-level operating system, based on the Linux kernel and a lot of free and open source software. We are happy to hear that it is based on Gentoo Hardened!

Gentoo would like to congratulate Gibix and JSteward for finishing and passing Google’s Summer of Code for the 2018 calendar year. Gibix contributed by enhancing Rust (programming language) support within Gentoo. JSteward contributed by making a full Gentoo GNU/Linux distribution, managed by Portage, run on devices which use the original Android-customized kernel.

The final reports of their projects can be reviewed on their personal blogs:

• Gibix: Journey into Gentoo eclass, GSoC timeline
• JSteward: Final_report

Congratulations to security researcher and Gentoo developer Hanno Böck and his co-authors Juraj Somorovsky and Craig Young for winning one of this year’s coveted Pwnie awards!

The award is for their work on the Return Of Bleichenbacher’s Oracle Threat or ROBOT vulnerability, which at the time of discovery affected such illustrious sites as Facebook and Paypal. Technical details can be found in the full paper published at the Cryptology ePrint Archive.

As last year, there will be a Gentoo booth again at the upcoming FrOSCon “Free and Open Source Conference” in St. Augustin near Bonn! Visitors can meet Gentoo developers to ask any question, get Gentoo swag, and prepare, configure, and compile their own Gentoo buttons.

The conference is 25th and 26th of August 2018, and there is no entry fee. See you there!

2018-07-04 14:00 UTC

We believe this incident is now resolved. Please see the incident report for details about the incident, its impact, and resolution.

2018-06-29 15:15 UTC

The community raised questions about the provenance of Gentoo packages. Gentoo development is performed on hardware run by the Gentoo Infrastructure team (not github). The Gentoo hardware was unaffected by this incident. Users using the default Gentoo mirroring infrastructure should not be affected.

If you are still concerned about provenance or are unsure what solution you are using, please consult https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Portage/Repository_Verification. This will instruct you on how to verify your repository.

2018-06-29 06:45 UTC

The gentoo GitHub organization remains temporarily locked down by GitHub support, pending fixes to pull-request content.

For ongoing status, please see the Gentoo infra-status incident page.

For later followup, please see the Gentoo Wiki page for GitHub 2018-06-28. An incident post-mortem will follow on the wiki.

Students who want to spend their summer having fun and writing code can do so now for Gentoo. Gentoo has been accepted as a mentoring organization for this year’s Google Summer of Code.

The GSoC is an excellent opportunity for gaining real-world experience in software design and making one’s self known in the broader open source community. It also looks great on a resume.

Initial project ideas can be found here, although new projects ideas are welcome. For new projects time is of the essence: there is typically some idea-polishing which must occur before the March 27th deadline. Because of this it is strongly recommended that students refine new project ideas with a mentor before proposing the idea formally.

GSoC students are encouraged to begin discussing ideas in the #gentoo-soc IRC channel on the Freenode network.

Further information can be found on the Gentoo GSoC 2018 wiki page. Those with unanswered questions should not hesitate to contact the Summer of Code mentors via the mailing list.

Excitement is building with FOSDEM 2018 only a few days away. There are now 14 current and one former developer in planned attendance, along with many from the Gentoo community.

This year one Gentoo related talk titled Unix? Windows? Gentoo! will be given by Michael Haubenwallner (haubi ) of the Gentoo Prefix project.

Two more non-Gentoo related talks will be given by current Gentoo developers:

• Andreas K. Huettel (dilfridge ) – Perl in the Physics Lab
• Andrew Savchenko (bircoph ) – The Invisible Internet Project

If you attend don’t miss out on your opportunity to build the Gentoo web-of-trust by bringing a valid governmental ID, a printed key fingerprint, and various UIDs you want certified. See you at FOSDEM!

Put on your cow bells and follow the herd of Gentoo developers to Université libre de Bruxelles in Brussels, Belgium. This year FOSDEM 2018 will be held on February 3rd and 4th.

Our developers will be ready to candidly greet all open source enthusiasts at the Gentoo stand in building K. Visit this year’s wiki page to see which developer will be running the stand during the different visitation time slots. So far seven developers have specified their attendance, with most-likely more on the way!

Unlike past years, Gentoo will not be hosting a keysigning party, however participants are encouraged to exchange and verify OpenPGP key data to continue building the Gentoo Web of Trust. See the wiki article for more details.

As you may know the core of sys-kernel/hardened-sources has been the grsecurity patches. Recently the grsecurity developers have decided to limit access to these patches. As a result, the Gentoo Hardened team is unable to ensure a regular patching schedule and therefore the security of the users of these kernel sources. Thus, we will be masking hardened-sources on the 27th of August and will proceed to remove them from the main ebuild repository by the end of September. We recommend to use sys-kernel/gentoo-sources instead. Userspace hardening and support for SELinux will of course remain in the Gentoo ebuild repository. Please see the full news item for additional information and links.

Upcoming weekend, 19-20th August 2017, there will be a Gentoo booth again at the FrOSCon “Free and Open Source Conference” 12, in St. Augustin near Bonn! Visitors can see Gentoo live in action, get Gentoo swag, and prepare, configure, and compile their own Gentoo buttons. See you there!

As FOSDEM 2017 approaches we are happy to announce there are a total of five Gentoo developers scheduled to give talks!

Developers and their talks include:

• Vladimir Smirnov (civil ) – Graphite@Scale or How to store millions metrics per second
• Andrew Savchenko (bircoph ) – Quantum computing and post-quantum cryptography
• Rafael Martins (rafaelmartins ) – Improving your virtualization development workflow with Lago
• Hanno Böck (hanno ) – Is the Linux Desktop less secure than Windows 10?
• Jason A. Donenfeld (zx2c4 ) – WireGuard: Next Generation Secure Kernel Network Tunnel

Only a few hours remain until the event kicks off. See you at FOSDEM!

It's that time of year again! Gentoo will be present at FOSDEM 2017!

The Gentoo project mourns the loss of Jonathan Portnoy, better known amongst us as Jon, or avenj.

Jon was an active member of the International Gentoo community, almost since its founding in 1999. He was still active until his last day.

His passing has struck us deeply and with disbelief. We all remember him as a vivid and enjoyable person, easy to reach out to and energetic in all his endeavors.

On behalf of the entire Gentoo Community, all over the world, we would like to convey our deepest sympathy for his family and friends. As per his wishes, the Gentoo Foundation has made a donation in his memory to the Perl Foundation.

Please join the community in remembering Jon on our forums.

This weekend, the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg will host the Free and Open Source Software Conference, better known as FrOSCon. Gentoo will be present there on 20 and 21 August with a chance for you to meet devs and other users, grab merchandise, and compile your own Gentoo button badges.

See you there!

We’re happy to announce the availability of an updated Gentoo LiveDVD. As usual, you can find it on our downloads page.

We are excited to announce that 5 students have been selected to participate with Gentoo during the Google Summer of Code 2016!

You can follow our students’ progress on the gentoo-soc mailing list and chat with us regarding our GSoC projects via IRC in #gentoo-soc on freenode.
Congratulations to all the students. We look forward to their contributions!

Find out more about the accepted projects

Gentoo Miniconf 2016 will be held in Prague, Czech Republic during the weekend of 8 and 9 October 2016. Like last time, is hosted together with the LinuxDays by the Faculty of Information Technology of the Czech Technical University.

Want to participate? The call for papers is open until 1 August 2016.

Students are encouraged to start working now on their project proposals. You can peruse the list of ideas or come up with your own. In any case, it is highly recommended you talk to a mentor sooner rather than later. The official application period for student proposals starts on March 14th.

Do not hesitate to join us in the #gentoo-soc channel on freenode. We will be happy to answer your questions there.
More information on Gentoo’s GSoC effort is also available on our Wiki.

The new year kicks off with two large events with Gentoo participation: The Southern California Linux Expo SCALE14x and FOSDEM 2016, both featuring a Gentoo booth.

Get all the details and a special discount code for attending SCALE.

Good things come to those who wait: The main Gentoo package repository (also known as the Portage tree or by its historic name gentoo-x86) is now based on Git.

Learn more about the history of the undergoing and what changes this move entails.

Changes to the Gentoo Git hosting setup may require URL changes in your checkouts: Repositories are now only available via git.gentoo.org for authenticated users and anongit.gentoo.org for read-only traffic.

Thank you for participating in Gentoo’s 2015 April Fools’ joke!

Now that April 1 has passed, we shed a tear as we say goodbye CGA Web™ but also to our website. Our previous website, that is, that has been with us for more than a decade.