Alpine Linux has released version 3.18.18.0, available for download from their website. It is a minimalistic distribution built on the basis of the MUSL system library and a set of Busybox utilities, which is known for its safety requirements and SSP protection.
The new issue has several updates, including a Linux nucleus update before the release of 6.1, experimental support for the automated installation, and launch in cloud environment without administrator participation. The distribution also includes updates to various packages, including MUSL LIBC 1.2.4 with TCP support in DNS resolver, OpenSSL 3.1, Nginx 1.24, LLVM 16, and E2Fsprogs 1.47.0.
Tiny-cloud, the package developed by Alpine, has been added, which is an analogue of Cloud-init that consumes fewer resources and uses the minimum number of dependencies. It performs tasks such as expanding the root FS to an affordable disk space and setting up a network based on a cloud provider, among others. AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, and NoCloud are supported from cloud environments.
All packages for architectures PPC64le, X86, and X86_64 are assembled with the option “-WL, -z, Pack-RELATIVE-RELOCS,” which includes the use of relative movements of address DT_RELR. This reduces the size of executable files by an average of 10%.
Pre-compiled binary files for Python, pyc files from the __pycache__ catalog, are put into separate packages that cannot be installed to save disk space. Users should specify “! PYC” while starting APK.
Alpine version 3.18.18.0 is available in six versions, including standard, with a core without patches, expanded, for virtual machines, and for the XEN hypervisor. It is used to form the official Docker containers and is used in the Postmarketos project.
Users can download ISO-images from Alpine’s website for x86_64, x86, ARMHF, AARCH64, ARMV7, PPC64le, and S390x architectures.