Gardenhouse Version 1.0 Released!

Today marks the release of the first Gardenhouse version and all of its surrounding components!

Gardenhouse started as a “simple” and hacky script to build an immutable Gentoo system for one of my devices. After showing it to my friend navi she suggested making the configuration reside purely in Gentoo profiles, that way Gardenhouse could be a simple profile to rootfs builder.

After implementing that, I took it upon myself to continue working on Gardenhouse to offer a non-systemd version of mkosi and implementation the things outlined in Lennart Poetterings “Fitting everything together” blog post.

This started gradually, with the implementation of dm-verity support using dracut-verity, followed by boot-bless and so on.

Initially this began as a way to provide some of the (arguably very nice) features of systemd in a portable and seperate fashion. After they have shown that they use AI agents in the development of systemd, many users felt betrayed, and I found another important reason to keep working on Gardenhouse, to provide an AI-free implementation of various systemd utilities.

This brought the creation of Stem, the second UKI compatible efi-stub to be developed, which not only allowed Gardenhouse to depend on one less systemd component, but also allows projects like ZFSBootMenu to no longer require systemd-stub. And the creation of Rootloader, a UEFI bootloader in the same fashion as systemd-boot.

Both of these tools follow their respective UAPI specifications, meaning they are mostly drop in replacements to their respective systemd counterparts.

Plans for the future

The first release is already an important step, but it’s by far not the last step. Much more is planned for Gardenhouse, the final goal being the ability to completely use it without having systemd-utils installed.

Additionally Gardenhouse will continue to be maintained while I use it for my own devices. And I do not plan on stopping anytime soon!