linux 5.10 used in alpine linux

[nick65go]

Alpine Linux begins to use linux kernel 5.10 on 15 dec 2020, see "main/linux-lts: upgrade to 5.10.1" on https://git.alpinelinux.org/aports/log
FYI: Alpine is "similar" with Tinycore: (can) boot in RAM, from USB/CDROM/HDD, without instalation. So it can be run as in virgin state (same as TC goal) if you want. But can also be HDD installed. It has backup/restore (as TC) for user appl or preferences.

It uses busybox (as TC) and musl (intead of libc). Appls/pakages are compiled with gcc 10.2 in automatic mode (with build log for inspection the of compile parameters and security patches), so you not need to trust user submited pakages (tcz), but only developer/robot scripts publicaly inspected.

The point here is NOT to compare Alpine with TC, but to notify you about its use of up-to-date kernels, libraries, Appls/Xorg, compiler, etc. Oh, it compiles ALL its applications (inclusive ex: firefox) for you.

[hiro]

sure, i'm using alpine sometimes.

i will tell you why i still use tc, though (and my point is to compare Alpine with TC):

alpine can only copy packages to RAM and yet i cannot unmount the boot flash drive. packages can not be mounted, so you have to copy them to RAM, always. also related: there's this inflexible "modloop" functionality that requires a mount, but it is only used for the kernel modules somehow. it's exactly the wrong way around and kernel module packages and firmware are needlessly separated from the rest of the packages.
i also don't like lbu, filetool.sh feels simpler.

tinycore will either copy to RAM, then you can throw away the boot drive, or it will mount the squashfs packages and not waste RAM, only in the latter case the drive with the tce packages needs to stay connected.

since i'm complaining already, here some other smaller issues:
alpine has lots of undocumented features, that partly are discussed on the wiki, but not in proper english, sometimes also outdated, so it's very hard to understand.

the alpine package repo is rather nice otoh, i bet they are able to reuse a lot of the already existing gentoo and bsd pkg recipes.

[nick65go]

Hi hiro!
TC is my main linux (both 32 and 64 bits options). Of course aside of alpine and win10 etc, each on dedicated partitions, grub2 bootloader etc. But because my HP buggy UEFI64, radeon APU insane brightness, I need to try up-to-date kernels hooping a new kernel could fix these.

Plus I like toybox (instead of busybox) and musl (instead of libc) if the target is minimalism. Security is abonus in Alpine, so its useful practice in chroot for x86 and x64 from TC_x64. Yes there are few thinhgs that I dislike in Alpine, as you enumerate them.

[vinceASPECT]

Hello forum,

hoped to try Alpine Linux. THere is a app "scrcpy" in the repo.

THe free app sends Anroid device screens to Laptops giving a full screen android computer.

Thx.

vin

[nick65go]

finaly on 14/01/2021, Alpine Linux managed to issue release 3.13.0 (stable, not rc5) with kernel 5.10.7.
PS: it seams to have a package flwm (forked from tinycore), and a wbar package etc

[hiro]

yep, i also got the update.
most notably, wireguard now started working also without the wireguard-lts package.

i have a kind of frankenlinux machine that is a mix of principles that i got from smartos, alpine and tinycorelinux:

there's a little flash drive with alpine on it that feels like tinycorelinux, it has zfs modules added so that i can do all the same stuff as on smartos, also i have wireguard from mainline 5.10 kernel.
and after the zfs automount, datasets with all my 64bit and 32bit tinycorelinux installations are ready to be used.

i do not chroot into tinycorelinux any more, instead i use unshare -m to create a mount namespace, and then supply a special fstab to `mount -a -T`, so that /dev/, /sys and /tmp can be shared by all distros.

[vinnie]

I was looking for information on chroot and came across this page.
I am a user of Alpine as well.
However, there are 2-3 things I don't like about it:
1)the almost non-existent community, the only place you can hope for a response is the chat on irc/matrix.
2)They also tend to leave out reports of problems, currently I reported a brutal bug due to the normal operation of tar that doesn't save superdirectory permissions, ignored for two years: https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/alpine-conf/-/issues/10467 (I hope it's not in tinycore too)
3)musl, let's be clear, it's not that i prefer glibc but there is a lot of incompatible software

On the other hand for me the biggest problem of tinycore is the package management, due to the fact that the building is not automated with each new version you always lose a multitude of packages and this forces tinycore to remain a non prominent distro for the scarcity of available software (that's why i wanted to try to use tinycore with appimages).

@hiro

alpine can only copy packages to RAM and yet i cannot unmount the boot flash

This was one of the first things I missed about tinycore but in this one I found a solution on my own.
I didn't test it in depth but at least for that little bit it worked:
Assume that alpine is mounted on partition sda1:
.1) mount -o rw,remount /dev/sda1 #remount the pen in writing (if I remember correctly if you don't do it then you have problems at remounting)
.2) umount -l /dev/sda1 #unmount the pen in lazy mode
.3) mount /dev/sda1 /media/usb #if you need to remount the pen to make changes

I don't know smartos, I tried searching the internet but I didn't understand much about this distro.
Another interesting distro (but that currently doesn't work for me) if you want to have a look, is called easyos

[curaga]

A lazy umount followed by pulling the stick will cause corruption. You should never do that.

[vinceASPECT]

Hello, well without dwelling on non the topic.

Perhaps will enjoy trying Alpine. Interest. 
Hopefully it is just an .iso file which you put on media and boot.

It is small, right.

It sounds like the APPS is quite reasonable. It's mechanism is recognised.

"Dcore" is perhaps well comparable, but it didn't appear as a standard OS
so i have not returned to try it again....  no gui.    (don't know if that changed)

many thx

C

[vinnie]

A lazy umount followed by pulling the stick will cause corruption. You should never do that.

Do you know why? I found that command just because I couldn't unmount the disk that was always busy, but alpine is a distro started in ram like tinycore so they for some reason keep the disk busy not doing anything. I understand that -l doesn't unmount the disk if it's still writing.

@vince
alpine does not have any gui too, the installation process is also a little bit more complex than that of tinycore but they are  conceptually similar

[Rich]

Hi vinnie

... Do you know why? I found that command just because I couldn't unmount the disk that was always busy, ...

A drive will be busy if a file is open for reading or writing. There is a less obvious reason a drive will be busy if you
are not aware of it. That is just being in a directory on the drive, such as:
1. From a terminal or console,  cd /mnt/drive.  The drive will be busy.
2. Same holds true for Midnight Commander (mc). Have it display the contents of  /mnt/drive  and the drive will be busy.
3. Most if not all file managers will behave like Midnight Commander.

Interestingly, using the file dialogs such as  File->Open  or  File->Save As  in an editor or web browser did not exhibit that behavior. They likely close the directory after reading it. A directory, like everything else in Linux is just a file.

You can try to find what's blocking the umount command like this:

Code: [Select]

sudo lsof /dev/sda2 | grep -E "DIR|REG"Use the full  lsof , not the busybox version

[curaga]

Because it's not actually unmounting until later. And you don't know when "later" is. So when you pull the stick, it could still be mounted.

[nick65go]

https://www.alpinelinux.org/posts/Alpine-3.15.0-released.html

Linux kernels 5.15 (LTS) + xorg-server 21.1 + Initial support for UEFI Secure Boot on x86_64; etc.