Debian Outreach, Development and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 03, 2025

• Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in August 2025

• Debian Outreach Team: Spaarsh Gsoc Report

  I am Spaarsh Thakkar, a final-year Computer Science Engineering undergrad from India. My interests lie in research and systems. My recent work has been in and around Graphics Processing Units and I also hold a keen interest in Computer Networks. At the time of writing, I have been an open-source contributor for almost a year.

  Proposal Description (as shown on GSoC Project Profile¹)

  Due to Debian’s open-source nature, no Debian package in main can have a proprietary GPU package listed as a dependency. While Hey Hi (AI) and HPC workloads increasingly rely on GPU acceleration, many Debian packages still focus solely on CUDA, which is proprietary.

  With the advent of ROCm, an open-source GPU computing platform, we can now integrate full-fledged AMD GPU support into Debian packages. This will improve the experience of developers working in AI/ML and HPC while positioning Debian as a strong OS choice for GPU-driven workloads. The proposal aims to aid in solving the aforementioned program by packaging several ROCm packages for debian and add ROCm support to some existing debian packages.

• Charles: Making KGB less noisy

  This past month I did setup KGB to send notifications to #debian-lts when new merge requests were created in the LTS website’s repo and I learned a couple cool things. I’ve been trying to document things more so I don’t have to research the same topic months later, hence the blog seemed like a good idea, specially since many debianites have KGB set on their favorite IRC channel and this post will go to planet.debian.org.