GLFS News

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 Its use case has been replaced by Mesa's AMDGPU Gallium3D, Vulkan, and VA-API drivers.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.