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Alpine Linux 3.6.0 Released (alpinelinux.org)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the data-about-distros dept.

An anonymous reader quotes DistroWatch: Natanael Copa has announced the release of Alpine Linux 3.6.0. Alpine Linux is an independent, minimal operating system that is well suited to running servers, routers and firewalls. Version 3.6.0 introduces support for 64-bit POWER machines, 64-bit IBM z Systems computers and features many up to date packages, including PHP 7.1, LLVM 4.0 and version 6.3 of the GNU Compiler.
"Noteworthy new packages" include Rust 1.17.0 and Cargo 0.18.0, as well as Julia 0.5.2, as we ll as "significant updates" like Go 1.8, Python 3.6, and Ruby 2.4. And in addition, "MD5 and SHA-1 hashes have been removed from APKBUILDs, being obsoleted by SHA-512."

24 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Who cares? by F.Ultra · · Score: 1

    Linux have a far higher market share than 2% on "servers, routers and firewalls" that TFS mentions. And still 2% of the worlds desktop users are still a significant number of people considering just how many desktop users there are out there.

  2. Best thing: Not a Poetterix! by gweihir · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Their statement is "We have no plans to implement/switch to systemd, and will try preventing it will ever happen." Looks like there _are_ several sane distributions still around.

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    1. Re:Best thing: Not a Poetterix! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Another cool thing about Alpine is it doesn't use GNU.

    2. Re:Best thing: Not a Poetterix! by syzler · · Score: 2

      Another cool thing about Alpine is it doesn't use GNU.

      And if that were even remotely true, it would be interesting.

      Alpine Linux uses MUSL libc and busybox unlike the majority of Linux distros which use GNU for the vast majority of it's user space (i.e. GNU libc, GNU coreutils, GNU sed, GNU awk, etc). Alpine Linux does appear to use GRUB and has GNU gcc and GNU binutils. However for a Linux system, completely abandoning GNU gcc/binutils is not practical since the Linux kernel cannot yet be built with LLVM/CLANG.

      So I guess it would have been more appropriate to say that Alpine Linux is not *GNU/Linux* since it is not anymore GNU/Linux than it is *OpenSSL/Linux* or *Dropbear/Linux*.

      More appropriately it is *MUSL/Linux*.

    3. Re:Best thing: Not a Poetterix! by unixisc · · Score: 1

      I'm assuming that the reason for this was that they wanted to get away from as much GPL stuff as possible, in order to be commercially acceptable. In which case, why did they stay w/ Linux at all, particularly since it necessitated their use of GCC, GRUB & binutils. They could have built this on a FreeBSD or NetBSD platform, which would have enabled them to go LLVM/Clang as well as a complete BSDL licensed ecosystem

    4. Re:Best thing: Not a Poetterix! by syzler · · Score: 5, Informative

      MUSL and busybox (FYI, busybox is GPL) fit better with the first of the Alpine Linux's stated design goals which are "Small, simple, and secure." MUSL's dynamic libc is only 527K where as glibc is 7.9M. Static hello program is 13K with MUSL and 662K with glibc. Busybox is less than 1M, however coreutils is >13M, vim is >28M, GNU sed/awk is > 2M, etc. MUSL and Busybox make a smaller system than GNU libc, GNU coreutils, and other GNU userspace programs replaced by busybox.

      About Alpine>

      C standard library comparisons

    5. Re:Best thing: Not a Poetterix! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      It is true, you uninformed little shit.

      Why the fuck does the average Slashdotter think that he knows everything? Clearly you are talking out of your ass and have never used or seen Alpine. Being not-GNU is what it's famous (or infamous) for.

    6. Re:Best thing: Not a Poetterix! by dbIII · · Score: 1

      I'm assuming that the reason for this was that they wanted to get away from as much GPL stuff as possible, in order to be commercially acceptable

      I doubt it. I suspect it's more like uClinux where it was a matter of choosing things to go into a small footprint.

      There really are not that many people who make the licence their first choice over function and nearly all of those are too busy arguing about licences to put together a distro.

    7. Re:Best thing: Not a Poetterix! by dbIII · · Score: 1

      It's GPL, like linux itself, but not a GNU project, like linux itself.
      I don't think even the Gnu people want to take credit for absolutely every bit of code licenced under the GPL.
      The LiGnuX and then gnu/linux thing was a special case to raise to profile of Gnu.

  3. Re:Who cares? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    It's tiny, it's used as the base system for containers mainly. No clue who'd run this directly.

  4. Re:Who cares? by OrangeTide · · Score: 1

    I think there are more Android devices than Windows desktops, several times more really. You may need to reevaluate your market share numbers from 2005.

    Also we shouldn't post news of the Hubble telescope or James Webb telescope. Astronomy makes up less than 2% of science, and those telescopes make up a tiny fraction of the 2%.

    --
    “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
  5. Re:Who cares? by boulat · · Score: 1

    Containers are run on most production systems, including microservices. If your infrastructure runs docker/mesos/kubernetes, chances are you are either using Debian, Ubuntu, or some really tiny distribution like Alpine or CoreOS.

  6. Re:Who cares? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Alpine Linux has been adopted by Docker as their preferred GNU/Linux distribution for containers. I have been using this distribution for the past 2 years which has enabled me to build and deploy small-footprint images running applications in isolation, as well as creating an environment for students to learn how the command line applications can be put to use in data analytics.

    I began using GNU/Linux, in the form of SLS, during the autumn of 1992 and switched full-time during the winter of 2000 initially with Debian GNU/Linux, followed by Ubuntu Linux during the summer of 2011, eventually moving to Xubuntu Linux during the autumn of 2015.

  7. Opinions? by IMightB · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I know and have used alpine ... mainly in docker containers, I'm not super thrilled with it. Overall, it's main selling point is that, initially... it's small....

  8. Re: Who cares? by staalmannen · · Score: 1

    It also happens to be the operating-system-of-choice for docker containers since it is so light weight.

  9. Re:Who cares? by gweihir · · Score: 1

    There is nothing funny about being a dysfunctional sadist...

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
  10. Re: by gweihir · · Score: 1

    Actually not having these commercial backers may be an advantage here.

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
  11. Any way to build Alpine userspace? by klapaucjusz · · Score: 2

    Alpine looks pretty cool. A sane init system, musl instead of libc, a decent package manager, what more could you want?

    A couple of years ago, I inherited a proprietary ARM board with a large number of GBE NICs, an unmaintained vendor kernel, and the worst userspace you can imagine (and I know you can imagine a lot). I spent half a day trying to build an Alpine userspace for armhf and get it installed on the board.

    I finally gave up. It took me 20 minutes to set up debootstrap under qemu, another 20 minutes to coerce debootstrap into using sysvinit instead of systemd. Tar.gz, scp, replace the root filesystem, and the board is running Debian Jessie userspace.

    I haven't looked at Alpine since then. Is there now a convenient way to build a custom Alpine root filesystem?

  12. Re:Who cares? by OrangeTide · · Score: 1

    Google is dumping Linux for its phones, though.

    What you may think you know about Fuchsia OS is wrong.

    Linux will have both the quickest rise and fall in usage in all operating systems history!

    Linux: a flash in the pan!

    R.I.P. Linux (1991-2017) - Died so young, only 25 years old
    R.I.P. MS-DOS (1981-1994) - Wait only 13 years before its demise?

    --
    “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
  13. pretty unstable in my experience by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Too many problems to cite them all. But the main one was hard system lockup. The log files didn't give a clue. The system would just freeze. Run fine for 5 or 6 days, and then just freeze solid. Couldn't ssh into it. Couldn't use the console. Just a hard freeze. Do not use this for anything approaching mission critical because it will let you down at the worst possible time. Maybe I'll give this version a shot to see if they've fixed the problem.

  14. Linux on non-PCs by unixisc · · Score: 1

    In the platforms listed above - 64-bit POWER machines, 64-bit IBM z Systems computers - Windows 10 does not exist. Linux based OSs are the only game in town. IBM does a distro (I believe it's a RHEL port), and now, you have Alpine Linux w/ one as well. I wonder whether IBM still bothers about AIX at all?

    1. Re:Linux on non-PCs by unixisc · · Score: 1

      I was under the impression that IBM has been moving away from such OSs, such as MVS or VM. In case of AIX, I know they've been going Linux, but I was curious about the stories w/ MVS & OS/400

  15. Great Raspberry Pi Distro by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    In addition to the attention it gets as a base image for containers they actually ship a fairly well supported version for Raspberry Pi: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi

    I've had far fewer issues with it than I have with Raspbian and it's default ramdisk configuration means that you are very unlikely to end up with a corrupted SD card in long lived embedded situations.

  16. Re:MD5, SHA-1 by syzler · · Score: 1

    Both MD5 and SHA-1 are perfectly good hashing algorithms for non-cyptographic purposes. Removing them make me think that the Alpine folks don't know exactly what they are doing.

    Based on how the summary is worded,

    And in addition, "MD5 and SHA-1 hashes have been removed from APKBUILDs, being obsoleted by SHA-512.

    I'm guessing they replaced MD5 and SHA1 hashes for validating their repositories. Since both MD5 has collision vulnerabilities and SHA1 is starting to have attacks as well, it is probably wise to obsolete these hashes in favor of a new hash. Even Git developers are starting to make plans to move away from SHA1.