The FreeDesktop.org GitLab instance that is heavily relied upon for the development of the Mesa graphics drivers, Wayland, and many other Linux desktop projects will be down for up to one week later this month due to its cloud migration.

Development of Mesa and other FreeDesktop.org projects dependent upon GitLab for handling of merge requests, continuous integration, bug reporting, and other services will grind to a halt for several days due to the GitLab instance downtime. The planned migration start date is on 16 March and is expected to last up to one week.

As noted back in January, [1]X.Org / FreeDesktop.org hit a new cloud crisis with losing out on their Equinix Metal infrastructure at the end of April. This infrastructure had been kindly sponsored by Equinix but now is going away and leaving the FreeDesktop.org administrators to quickly figure out a new hosting solution.

FreeDesktop.org administrators have decided to go with [2]Hetzner servers and Fastly as a CDN . They are now sorting through their migration plans in migrating all of the data from Equinix Metal to German host Hetzner.

There will be downtime when they shutdown the Equinix-hosted GitLab instance, back everything up, and then transition everything over. They estimate it taking up to one week beginning on 16 March during which the development of such hosted projects will effectively grind to a halt. Details for those interested via [3]this tracking ticket .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/2025-XOrg-FreeDesktop-Cloud

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeDesktop.org-Hosting-2025

[3] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/freedesktop/freedesktop/-/issues/2076