GLFS News

GLFS-13.0 has been released!

Zeckma - 2026/03/05

The GLFS team is proud to present version 13.0 of Gaming Linux From Scratch. This version includes over 120 packages beyond the base Linux From Scratch and Multilib Linux From Scratch books to enable execution of gaming support software. It has had over 200 updates since 12.4, as well as many additions and other significant changes.

The main kicker of this release, which is the same case with the other LFS projects, is that SysVinit has been dropped as an option and is no longer supported. What this means for GLFS is that the SysVinit version as is cannot be read online but still exists in the book source to be rendered. There are no promises that the source will render for SysVinit or that the contained instructions will work as shown. Previous versions that had official support for SysVinit can be found here.

Speaking of, starting with GLFS-13.0, stable releases and all previous stable releases can now be read online via the above link! It also has the current rolling release version if that is more your speed.

Onto the more technical changes for the book, there have been some package removals. PCRE2, SQLite, and Python3 have been removed as their roles are now filled with LFS/MLFS. PCRE2 and SQLite are in the precursor books, and the Python3 rebuild is no longer necessary as SQLite is built before Python3 now. VDPAU has also been removed, meaning that libvdapu and libvdpau-va-gl are no longer in the book. VA-API is now the standard, and Mesa removed VDPAU support entirely. The ply Python module has also been removed as it is no longer necessary for any package in the book. The VDPAU and ply removals are also reflected in BLFS; BLFS no longer has those packages.

There have been significant changes to the graphics stack.

In GLFS-12.4, Mesa's OpenGL libraries (libGL, libEGL, etc.) have been supported, alongside libglvnd's OpenGL libraries. In GLFS-13.0, Mesa's libraries have been dropped in favor of libglvnd, returning to how it was in the beginning of GLFS. There are various reasons for this change, most of them coming down to compatibility with several binary applications, AppImages, and package build systems (notably CMake-based). If desired, the page for Mesa explains how to override this but it is heavily warned against. GLU, which used to be in SLFS, is now in GLFS for simplicity's sake. Among this change regarding OpenGL, the GBM solution which previously came from Mesa has now been replaced with a lighter yet fully compatible solution: libgbm. The libgbm package only requires libdrm and it's installed by default. The Mesa installation instructions call for libgbm instead of building Mesa's solution. This has been a part of an initiative to have a fully Mesa-less system for GPU drivers outside of Mesa like NVIDIA while also providing light solutions for Mesa's backbone. The final piece of this initiative was to include a few necessary C headers and a pkg-config file from Mesa to provide full compatibility to various packages like Xorg-Server and Mutter. A dedicated page exists for this: "DRI from Mesa," which used to just be included in the GBM page. The necessary files can either be copied from the Mesa tarball or downloaded from the internet so that the Mesa tarball can be skipped entirely if desired. Mesa and NVIDIA are no longer build dependencies for any packages, but are still needed at runtime depending on your GPU.

Besides the Mesa emancipation, NVIDIA released major version r590 which ended support for pre-turing GPUs. Thus, both NVIDIA-r590 and NVIDIA-r580 are in the book. To have a more comprehensive setup, packages from SLFS (nv-codec-headers (ffnvcodec) and CUDA) have been moved to GLFS, and NVIDIA-VA-API-Driver was added to provide support for VA-API on NVIDIA. This change meant the Graphics Chapter has been split up into a precursor chapter, an NVIDIA chapter which is split up for revisions, and a Mesa chapter.

OpenCL support has also now been added in the book via the OpenCL-Headers and OCL-ICD (libOpenCL) package additions. Because OCL-ICD requires Ruby, Ruby has also been added.

Since the amount of tooling has summed up to a lot, all of the tools, Python modules, and build systems have been moved to a new chapter called "Tooling."

Other package additions include SDL3 (SDL2 being moved to sdl2-compat), libatomic_ops, inih, and GameMode.

There have been other smaller but notable changes. The NVIDIA install script now has an uninstall option. Dependency lists are now collapsible. FreeType2 no longer requires 2 passes since it can now load HarfBuzz dynamically instead of linking. The GLFS logo has been updated. Wine has a new WoW64 architecture. For lib32 installation instructions using Meson, the cross files are now used by default, and depend on the pkgconf and Meson file creation in MLFS. The GLFS theme is now dynamic, meaning that it changes based on your browser theme preference. The light theme, part of the dynamic theme, now matches the theme of LFS and BLFS. Images are no longer used for boxes for notes and warnings, but instead use unicode that should show on most devices.

There have been some rewrites, typo fixes, rewording, and other documentation improvements.

You can read the GLFS-13.0 here.

MLFS now has a stable version starting with 13.0.

For any issues, please direct them to the issue tracker.

GLFS 12.4 has been released!

Zeckma - 2025/08/31

The GLFS team is proud to present version 12.4 of Gaming Linux From Scratch. This version includes over 100 packages beyond the base Linux From Scratch and Multilib Linux From Scratch books to enable execution of gaming support software. It has had over 190 updates since 12.3, as well as many additions, removals, shifting, combinations, and text and formatting changes.

Previously removed packages that were in the book before 12.3 released have been reintroduced back into the book, those being libglvnd and NVIDIA. Along with the addition of libglvnd, special care has been made to explain differences between libglvnd's libOpenGL and Mesa's libGL, and to support both vendors. Most support has come from the way of Supplemental LFS, hosting installation instructions of packages such as OBS and Hyprland. Further package additions include SQLite, Python3 rebuild against SQLite, Speex, and NVIDIA EGL Libraries.

However, some packages have been removed. Some were removed because they served no use for GLFS or belonged in a different book and thus have been moved. Those that already have installation instructions elsewhere and served no use are libFS from Xorg Libraries, luit, and Git. The package that isn't needed, but has no instruction elsewhere, is AMDGPU PRO. Its use case has been replaced by Mesa's AMDGPU Gallium3D, Vulkan, and VA-API drivers. Those that got moved were seatd and xcb-util-errors, which both have been moved to Supplemental LFS as no package in GLFS requires them.

Several refactors have also been made. In some cases, this means packages are moved to other chapters to be more coherent, other times packages are combined into a single page for ease of installation, and all else fall out of those pages. For packages combining into a single page, all gst packages like gstreamer, gst-plugins-bad, and gst-libav have all been combined into a GStreamer Suite page, whereas Vulkan-Headers, Vulkan-Loader, SPIRV-Headers, SPIRV-Tools, and glslang have been combined into a Vulkan-SDK page. Special care has been made to properly address what BLFS packages each page would be the equivalent of. libevdev and libinput has been moved out of the main X11 chapter, and Xorg Input Drivers by extension, as they are used by Wayland compositors pretty frequently. XCB Utils had xcb-util-errors moved to SLFS and proceeded to be moved to Basic X11 Software, again as they are sometimes used by Wayland compositors.

Support for 32-bit CPUs has also been removed due to a lack of testing. This does not mean that 32-bit libraries are no longer being built, otherwise Steam would fail to work. However, Steam is not tested on 32-bit CPUs, thus it is not supported on such platforms. Therefore, only x86_64 CPUs are supported in GLFS.

Some other miscellaneous changes have been made. While not technically a package addition, it adds only a single library and some headers from an existing package, GBM From Mesa. Instructions for it alone have been made so that NVIDIA users would not have to install Mesa drivers they won't need. NVIDIA only needs libgbm from Mesa. A smaller change is the color scheme has been adjusted to have a more purple look. libglvnd has also been preferred over Mesa's libGL in the book, although there is still support for the Mesa vendor. libglvnd is what most binaries on Linux build against, and many build systems ask for it explicitly, so users are highly encouraged to use it when daily driving an LFS or MLFS + GLFS system. Various efforts have been made to link external packages to Supplemental LFS if applicable, such as Mesa-Demos. This book and BLFS have also made changes to better accommodate GNOME on NVIDIA systems, while Supplemental LFS has offered some duplicate packages to fix building with libglvnd, such as GLU. SLFS also now has SDL3, so any package in GLFS that depends on SDL2 will link to both SDL2 in the book and sdl2-compat. Lastly, documentation and explanations have greatly improved since 12.3, such as drilling down exactly what MinGW-w64 is and why Wine wants it, to discussing GLES v1, v2, and v3 and if you want it or not whilst providing the options to completely disable such support.

This is a coordinated release with GLFS-12.4-systemd.

You can read the 12.4 version via download.

MLFS-12.4 rendering instructions are in the book.

For any issues, please direct them to the issue tracker.

Advisories now available

Zeckma - 2025/06/22

Advisories for broken changes and security issues are now provided on this site. Github tickets are no longer the primary resource to learn about these issues.

To read them, see the GLFS advisories.

AMDGPU PRO page deprecated, removal before GLFS 12.4

Zeckma - 2025/05/31

AMDGPU PRO had a niche use case: the AMD Media Framework, or AMF, used for encoding and decoding, for use with a small selection of workstation applications on Linux.

AMD in their newest release of AMDGPU PRO has removed the OpenGL, Vulkan, and AMF drivers and urged people to use the Mesa and VA-API driver stack instead.

Thus, since its usecase no longer exists for LFS, the page for it in GLFS is now considered deprecated. It will be removed right before the release of GLFS 12.4. As AMD has said, please move to Mesa and VA-API. Performance for both is better than AMDGPU PRO's previous offerings. Like with AMF, FFmpeg has (better) support for VA-API.

GLFS 12.3 has been released!

Zeckma - 2025/03/05

The GLFS team is proud to present version 12.3 of Gaming Linux From Scratch, now matching up with the Linux From Scratch and Beyond Linux From Scratch release scheme. This version includes over 100 packages beyond the base Linux From Scratch and Multilib Linux From Scratch books to enable execution of gaming support software. It has over 160 updates since October 26th, 2024, as well as many text and formatting changes.

New in this book is the introduction of the Gstreamer suite, DXVK, and VKD3D-Proton for Wine. On top of this, Mesa's OpenGL libraries are now built instead of libglvnd's. Removed in this version is NVIDIA, libglvnd, GNAT (GCC-Ada), lib32-Check, and x11perf. Smaller changes include not using a prefix for Xorg other than /usr, but sets the prefix for Beyond Linux From Scratch compatibility; Steam can now play games without setting a variable for each game as a fix was made in Multilib Linux From Scratch; and MSVCRT is now the default C Runtime used for the MinGW-w64 toolchain, instead of UCRT.

NVIDIA and libglvnd support is planned for 12.4 but is gone from this release.

This is a coordinated release with GLFS-12.3-systemd.

You can read the 12.3 version via download.

MLFS-12.3 rendering instructions are in the book.

For any issues, please direct them to the issue tracker.

Releases now available

Zeckma - 2025/01/31

Downloadable releases now available.

Chunked HTML releases of GLFS are now available for download.

These releases include both the SysV and Systemd versions of the book.

For any issues, please direct them to the issue tracker.

Systemd Edition now available

Zeckma - 2025/01/15

Systemd support is now available in the book.

Due to Github Pages restraints, this version is not yet rendered online, but you can render it yourself.

For any issues, please direct them to the issue tracker.