MLFS News

Thomas' Multilib Pages Are Now Deprecated

Zeckma - 2026/03/13

For the majority of MLFS' life, the pages lived at ~thomas/, Thomas' name space, which most editors of LFS/BLFS have their own. This has led to various issues.

It firstly does not feel official, and creating stable releases would really clutter the name space. Another issue is that the pages have a single rendering script that only Thomas or the user's cronjob can run, and only a user with strong permissions can edit the rendering script. The script itself led to and is still causes issues, with new issues soon to come. One of those issues is that if the main LFS book's branch has not been updated the last time the render script checked, it will never render MLFS, even if changes to MLFS in particular have been made. If changes to MLFS have been made a few days ago, and LFS has not had a change, the script will not pull in the MLFS specific changes.

One of the upcoming changes will break the script. x32-bit library support will be removed, a bit type that is very rarely needed in practice. The vast majority of software that cannot be used reasonably for another x86 bit size targets either 32-bit or 64-bit.

This will break the rendering script. When this change happens, the rendering script will be removed, and every HTML in the multilib pages will redirect to the canonical HTML dev index for MLFS as the canonical pages will stay up to date. If you have the original MLFS pages bookmarked, please change the bookmark to the new pages of your choosing. If the development pages aren't your speed, you can view all the available options here.

MLFS-13.0 Release

Zeckma - 2026/03/05

The Multilib Linux From Scratch team is proud to present version 13.0 of MLFS.

MLFS has the same changes discussed in the LFS release notes, and more.

The main change is that more files are created within the instructions of Pkgconf and Meson to better provide compilation for 32-bit and x32-bit targets on x86_64. These files used to be created in GLFS, but upgrading packages in LFS that use Meson-based systems can cause issues without those files. The point of MLFS is to arm the system with a solid base for targetting 32-bit and x32-bit on x86_64, so the files are better suited for this book.

MLFS-12.4 switched to a different system of upgrading the kernel, but MLFS-13.0 now once again uses the system LFS uses.

In an earlier announcement, it was explained that editorship changed, and that the book got cleaned up. Both the looks and instructions of the book are more concise.

For the next version, it is planned for x32-bit support to be removed as its use in programs that don't have a 32-bit/64-bit version is extremely limited.

The following versions of MLFS-13.0 that can be read are linked below:

More releases online, change of editorship

Zeckma - 2026/02/15

Starting off, there have been efforts for a while to get MLFS rendered in a more official place, have official releases, and have all of them viewable online. That has now finally happened. Releases will now take place alongside LFS's releases, starting with 13.0-rc1 which can be read here. 13.0, when LFS and the other projects release it, will be followed with MLFS-13.0. For more releases, you can read the main page for more details.

Editorship has also been changed for months. Thomas Trepl, who maintained MLFS for a long time, stepped down. We thank him for all his work he made on MLFS. I was thus charged in the care of MLFS and have been cleaning various things up. Some of you may have noticed these changes. Stability and cleanliness are the forefront goals of MLFS and most of the work required has now come to pass.

I have various methods of contacting, so if you have any issues with MLFS, you can report them on the mailing lists, or to my email zeckma@linuxfromscratch.org. My Discord is also open if that suits you, which is @zeckma or zeckma#0000.

Happy compiling!

gcc defaults changed

Thomas Trepl - 2024/11/12

Added a sed to all of the gcc build instructions (chapter 5, 6, 8) to make the -mstackrealign flag set by default for the m32 builds.

ISL added

Thomas Trepl - long ago

The package ISL (see here) has been added so that gcc will pick it up for some optimizations.