Lately I've been thinking about how #Gentoo is perceived by people. So often they're stuck in the "ricer" mindset: Gentoo is being built from source, so it must be ZOMG fast. And if it isn't, then what's the point?

If I were to make four points for Gentoo (to stop myself from making more), they would be:

1. Gentoo is independent.

There is no company behind Gentoo. There is no business plan. It's made and maintained by volunteers. Driven by passion and not profit incentive. And we want to keep it that way.

2. Gentoo aims to be secure.

We are maintaining our own infrastructure to reduce the risk of being hijacked. We're securing our distribution channels and mirrors using OpenPGP. We're only using Codeberg (which we really appreciate) and GitHub as mirrors (with OpenPGP commit signatures) and contribution channels. We have a dedicated security team, who works with the developers to keep packages free of vulnerabilities and our users informed.

3. Gentoo is made by humans.

We banned LLM contributions two years ago, and never regretted it. We didn't "wait and see", we took decisive action, and if we got left behind, it's only for the better. Unfortunately, in today's LLM-ridden world we can't stop slop software from being packaged in Gentoo without sacrificing our commitment to keep packages up to date, but we try to keep the worst offenders (like copywashed chardet) at bay.

4. Gentoo supports sustainability.

This may sound ironic when so many of us build everything from source, but we're actually trying to make computing sustainable. Gentoo's source-first nature makes it inherently flexible. We try our best to support a plethora of older and less common hardware. We go against the flow and still try to provide a workable system on hardware that is not supported by Rust or V8. And on top of that, we do our best to provide binary packages for a variety of configurations.

Of course, that's not all. I want Gentoo to be reliable and stable, to be oriented towards privacy by default, to be welcome and respectful.

And all these things ultimately depend on people working on Gentoo, and contributing to Gentoo. We always need more people that share these principles and want to help us achieve them.

What do you appreciate in Gentoo?

Lately I've been thinking about how #Gentoo is perceived by people. So often they're stuck in the "ricer" mindset: Gentoo is being built from source, so it must be ZOMG fast. And if it isn't, then what's the point?

If I were to make four points for Gentoo (to stop myself from making more), they would be:

1. Gentoo is independent.

There is no company behind Gentoo. There is no business plan. It's made and maintained by volunteers. Driven by passion and not profit incentive. And we want to keep it that way.

2. Gentoo aims to be secure.

We are maintaining our own infrastructure to reduce the risk of being hijacked. We're securing our distribution channels and mirrors using OpenPGP. We're only using Codeberg (which we really appreciate) and GitHub as mirrors (with OpenPGP commit signatures) and contribution channels. We have a dedicated security team, who works with the developers to keep packages free of vulnerabilities and our users informed.

3. Gentoo is made by humans.

We banned LLM contributions two years ago, and never regretted it. We didn't "wait and see", we took decisive action, and if we got left behind, it's only for the better. Unfortunately, in today's LLM-ridden world we can't stop slop software from being packaged in Gentoo without sacrificing our commitment to keep packages up to date, but we try to keep the worst offenders (like copywashed chardet) at bay.

4. Gentoo supports sustainability.

This may sound ironic when so many of us build everything from source, but we're actually trying to make computing sustainable. Gentoo's source-first nature makes it inherently flexible. We try our best to support a plethora of older and less common hardware. We go against the flow and still try to provide a workable system on hardware that is not supported by Rust or V8. And on top of that, we do our best to provide binary packages for a variety of configurations.

Of course, that's not all. I want Gentoo to be reliable and stable, to be oriented towards privacy by default, to be welcome and respectful.

And all these things ultimately depend on people working on Gentoo, and contributing to Gentoo. We always need more people that share these principles and want to help us achieve them.

What do you appreciate in Gentoo?

New on #blog (this time with quotes from Fedi): "Why Gentoo?"

https://blogs.gentoo.org/mgorny/2026/05/28/why-gentoo/

"""
Multiple times in the past I’ve been thinking of how #Gentoo is perceived by the wider public, the non-users. What probably stands out most is compiling. Almost everyone who heard of Gentoo knows it has something to do with compiling everything. And why are we doing that? Well, besides being hardcore, the common sentiment goes for performance. So yeah, Gentoo users must be some kind of hardcore ricers who try to squeeze every last bit of their system performance.

To be honest, I don’t think that’s a good way to describe Gentoo. Yes, compiling is at the core of it. But performance? I don’t think so, at least not in the obvious, -O9999 -fzomg-fast way. The world has moved on, CPUs have gotten faster, optimizations have gotten smarter, and distributions have started optimizing more aggressively. Optimization-wise, I suspect your average Ubuntu package with generic optimizations may be no slower than the equivalent Gentoo package fine-tuned for your CPU. And if it’s not, then it probably won’t make a real difference anyway.

There’s much more to Gentoo than that. Yes, some of it comes from building from source: the flexibility. But a lot of it comes from the wider Gentoo philosophy, the philosophy that brought us all together. The idea that Gentoo is the distribution we’re making for ourselves and people who enjoy Gentoo. So if I were to make a few arguments for Gentoo, I’d focus on that. And this is what I’d like to do here.
"""

New on #blog (this time with quotes from Fedi): "Why Gentoo?"

https://blogs.gentoo.org/mgorny/2026/05/28/why-gentoo/

"""
Multiple times in the past I’ve been thinking of how #Gentoo is perceived by the wider public, the non-users. What probably stands out most is compiling. Almost everyone who heard of Gentoo knows it has something to do with compiling everything. And why are we doing that? Well, besides being hardcore, the common sentiment goes for performance. So yeah, Gentoo users must be some kind of hardcore ricers who try to squeeze every last bit of their system performance.

To be honest, I don’t think that’s a good way to describe Gentoo. Yes, compiling is at the core of it. But performance? I don’t think so, at least not in the obvious, -O9999 -fzomg-fast way. The world has moved on, CPUs have gotten faster, optimizations have gotten smarter, and distributions have started optimizing more aggressively. Optimization-wise, I suspect your average Ubuntu package with generic optimizations may be no slower than the equivalent Gentoo package fine-tuned for your CPU. And if it’s not, then it probably won’t make a real difference anyway.

There’s much more to Gentoo than that. Yes, some of it comes from building from source: the flexibility. But a lot of it comes from the wider Gentoo philosophy, the philosophy that brought us all together. The idea that Gentoo is the distribution we’re making for ourselves and people who enjoy Gentoo. So if I were to make a few arguments for Gentoo, I’d focus on that. And this is what I’d like to do here.
"""

Anything great morning.

So now #Typer, the NIH #Python CLI library, decided to start bundling #Click. Why? Of course there's a lot of marketing talk behind it. Which ofc means they just don't want to be bothered about following the API, and take the easy way out.

https://github.com/fastapi/typer/releases/tag/0.26.0

#Gentoo

I've been sad about the upcoming removal of #PyPy from #Gentoo, but given how many regressions I've been seeing recently in a variety of #Python packages, I'm eagerly waiting for the day when I'll remove the support and be able to stop having to deal with the test failures somehow. Not that at this point any other way of dealing besides skipping them makes any sense.

FYI, looks like #Migadu doesn't accept e-mail from gentoo.org (their server disconnects us after EHLO). One of their users contacted them, and they've basically replied with blanket response without doing anything to resolve the problem.

#Gentoo

I've just learned that #ReiserFS was mur… I mean, removed from the newest kernels.

In other news, one of anongit machines in #Gentoo Infra rotation is now suffering lack of data.

If #Python package releases continue at this rate, I'm going to start getting up earlier.

Or just stop doing all of them in the morning.

#Gentoo

The ebuild: I need a openapi-schema-validator newer than 0.8 and older than 0.9.

#Gentoo #Portage: okay, how about we try to simultaneously install 0.7.2 and 0.9.0?

We've also posted about our #CopyFail, #DirtyFrag, #Fragnesia handling on the #Gentoo website:

https://www.gentoo.org/news/2026/05/19/copy-fail-fragnesia-vulnerabilities.html

…and yes, another secfix round coming.

CC @wariat

I've finally finished pushing the latest update for #Gentoo Distribution Kernels, and requested their stabilization. This includes upstream releases 7.0.9, 6.18.32, 6.12.90 and 6.6.140; and Gentoo patch bumps 6.1.173_p1, 5.15.207_p1 and 5.10.256_p1.

All of these contain the v5 #Fragnesia patch. And yes, while the exploit is in the wild, upstream still hasn't merged a fix to the mainline kernel, let alone all the LTS branches.

They also include a few reverts in 6.18 and 6.6 for broken PowerPC backports that upstream didn't apparently test. 🤷

We're doing our best, but I'd still recommend running the latest 7.0.x kernel, or LTS 6.18.x, because upstream is far from reliable with the backports.

#Linux

If it wasn't enough that we have to keep building new kernels every day and backport vulnerability fixes to older LTS branches, now we also have to deal with upstream doing random backports that are completely broken and never bothering actually even checking if they build.

#Gentoo #Linux

I've done the right thing and it's going to cause pain.

#Gentoo Distribution Kernel configs are now hosted entirely on git.gentoo.org rather than GItHub. If you don't use Gentoo mirrors, you may be hitting 502s thanks to our LLM overlords now. If you use Gentoo mirrors, you may be hitting 404s if they hit 502s while trying to fetch from our Infra 🤷.

Guess what I'm doing right now.

Yes, it's now my shift to bump dist-kernels in #Gentoo.

Good news is that 6.12+ with Gentoo patches are good, and I've managed to stabilize them even. Only 6.6 and older are getting an extra upstream patches.

These days new vulnerabilities are found faster in kernels than I can manage to build patched kernels for #Gentoo.

https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/20260513041635.1289541-1-vakzz@zellic.io/
https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/agRfuVOeMI5pbHhY@v4bel/

Kudos to @thesamesam for staying on top of things.

One of my strong suites in all the packaging work is the knowledge in my head.

"Why don't you write it down for others to benefit from, then?", you'd ask.

The thing is, this knowledge is basically "hot cache". I'm bumping hundreds of #Python packages in #Gentoo, so I remember stuff. And because of that, I can quickly notice some things or answer some questions.

If that were written down, the effort needed to find it would diminish all the gain. I mean, technically *it is* already written down, and the whole point is that I have it "cached".

Did I just switch from hardcoding the #Gentoo patchset version in Distribution Kernel ebuilds (because we needed to rebase/update them so rarely) to using `${PV}`? Perhaps.

Gentoo Linux Begins Codeberg Migration In Moving Away From GitHub, Avoiding Copilot
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Gentoo-Starts-Codeberg-Use

#ai #copilot #github #gentoo #opensource

Inevitable moment:

f4e4ddaf69337 dev-build/steve: is no longer simple

#Gentoo

New on my #Gentoo blog: One #jobserver to rule them all

"""
A common problem with running Gentoo builds is concurrency. Many packages include extensive build steps that are either fully serial, or cannot fully utilize the available CPU threads throughout. This problem becomes less pronounced when running building multiple packages in parallel, but then we are risking overscheduling for packages that do take advantage of parallel builds.

Fortunately, there are a few tools at our disposal that can improve the situation. Most recently, they were joined by two experimental system-wide jobservers: #guildmaster and #steve. In this post, I’d like to provide the background on them, and discuss the problems they are facing.
"""

https://blogs.gentoo.org/mgorny/2025/11/30/one-jobserver-to-rule-them-all/

If you think #Gentoo was boring recently, I've been doing some stuff to make it more interesting. No need to thank me.

#FlexiBLAS: now default in order to break more ~arch systems
#FreePG: available as an alternative on ~arch, but dependencies need to be updated still to allow it more
#ZlibNG: started experimenting with it locally, flag still masked

I have the—perhaps incorrect—impression that the Gentoo project depends on a lot of custom (an sometimes legacy) software, and is suffering from decisions made decades ago...
Well, that and the fact that some components of it are incredibly complex (sob Portage <3 sob).

But maybe I'm missing the point here... -c-