On Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 08:02:25PM -0500, Christopher Browne via talk wrote:

I'd like to hear a bit about the "new kid on the block," Alpine Linux.

This is in heavy use by Docker folk; the general idea of it was to establish a small distribution without a lot of "cruft" that's suitable as a container OS.

They made some interesting choices: - Used to use uClibc as its libc, now uses musl, both being smaller and simpler than glibc - uses OpenRC as its init system - well, of course, they created their own package management system... - has some supposed hardening of the kernel - I find it interesting that a Linux kernel is around 3MB in size, but there are something like 130MB of kernel modules, which seems a bit ridiculous

Threat or offer ;-) is that I could prep a bit of material about Alpine, covering what I was interested in discovering; if someone has experience with it, that would be better than whatever I'd blather about ;-)

Well in the case of docker's use, there is no init system in most cases where it is used. It is certainly a lot smaller (often I see images shrink by 80% when switching to alpine). Docker of course doesn't use the alpine kernel build either, just the packages for the applications. -- Len Sorensen