News is bubbling up both from the Gentoo project and its successor, the tellingly named "Funtoo" – what Gentoo founder Daniel Robbins did next.
The source-based Gentoo Linux distribution, which still supports a wide range of CPU architectures, will soon support one less. The project leaders announced that it is removing support for Intel's Itanium processor family.
It had little choice in this. Like any other distro, Gentoo relies on upstream support for a platform in order to keep it working. The Linux kernel nearly removed Itanium support in February 2023, and finally did so in kernel 6.7 last October. As we predicted the following month, nobody has stepped up to maintain out-of-tree support.
That was followed earlier this year with confirmation that GCC 15 would also drop Itanium support. While distros with fixed release cycles can keep things around for a little longer – for instance, antiX Linux 23 still offers the option of kernel 4.9 – this is not true for a rolling-release distro such as Gentoo, which is based on the ever-changing current upstream code. Although GCC 15 is not out yet, once a CPU architecture is not supported in either the kernel itself or the compilers used to build a kernel, that really is a hard block on Gentoo supporting Itanic.
Funtoo may be foundering
Meanwhile, Funtoo, the distro that Gentoo founder Daniel Robbins started next, has a somewhat uncertain future. Robbins, who stepped away from Gentoo in 2004, went on to found another source-based distro, which uses different tooling. Late last month, he announced its end, saying:
A few weeks later, though, Robbins has changed his mind. He now says that the project will continue:
- Linux updates with an undo function? Some distros have that
- Compared to other distros, Vanilla OS 2 'Orchid' is rewriting how Linux works
- Linux Mint 22 'Wilma' still the Bedrock choice for moving off Windows
- OpenBSD enthusiast cooks up guide for the technically timid
Dr Cameron Kaiser, whose Canon Cat restoration we recently covered, has an implausible number of fingers in as many pies, and until a few years ago maintained the last web browser for PowerMacs.
There is some more background information on Gentoo's decision in this mailing list post describing the states of the various architectures that the distro supports. To us, this reads like some very major housekeeping would really help the project… and if Mr Robbins' hobby project becomes too onerous, perhaps some form of merger between them in the future?
Bootnote
Our thanks to Register reader Rony Muniz for letting us know about the end (or is it?) of the Funtoo project. ®