Concept

Alpine Linux

Alpine Linux is a Linux distribution designed to be small, simple and secure. Alpine Linux uses musl, BusyBox and OpenRC instead of the more commonly used glibc, GNU Core Utilities and systemd respectively. For security, Alpine compiles all user-space binaries as position-independent executables with stack-smashing protection. Because of its small size and rapid startup, it is commonly used in containers providing quick boot-up times, on virtual machines as well as on real hardware in embedded devices, such as routers, servers and NAS. Originally, Alpine Linux began as an embedded-first distribution for devices such as wireless routers, based on Gentoo Linux, inspired by and the Bering-uClibc branch of the LEAF Project. Founder Natanel Copa has said that the name was chosen as a backronym for "A Linux-Powered Network Engine" or some similar phrase, but that the exact phrase has since been forgotten. Alpine's package management system, the Alpine Package Keeper, was originally a collection of shell scripts but was later rewritten in C. The aim of this package manager is to achieve a high install and update speed, which it does by writing new data directly in-place into the operating system's , rather than employing caching or compression. In 2014, Alpine Linux switched from uClibc to musl as its C standard library. A PaX hardened kernel was included in the default distribution to aid in reducing the impact of exploits and vulnerabilities, but Alpine's maintainers chose to discontinue this support due to the PaX patch no longer being made publicly available. Alpine still uses a hardened toolchain and position-independent executables to minimize the potential for stack-based attacks, but is now based on the standard long term stable distribution of the Linux kernel. Alpine's primary feature is its small size, which enables it to start quickly and run in environments very low in memory and storage, such as containers or embedded devices. Alpine Linux can optionally be installed as a run-from-RAM operating system.

About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Related lectures (4)
Nanogap Electrodes: Electromigration and Modeling
Explores the synergy between nanomaterial and CMOS electronics for (bio)sensing applications, focusing on the electromigration method for nanogap electrodes.
Version Control System: Basics and Workflow
Introduces the basics of Version Control Systems, focusing on Git operations and branching strategies.
3D Stone Scanning Session
Introduces a 'professional' 3D measurement system for stone analysis and feature extraction using stereo photogrammetry and structured light technologies.
Show more
Related concepts (9)
Systemd
Systemd is a software suite that provides an array of system components for Linux operating systems. The main aim is to unify service configuration and behavior across Linux distributions. Its primary component is a "system and service manager" – an init system used to bootstrap user space and manage user processes. It also provides replacements for various daemons and utilities, including device management, login management, network connection management, and event logging.
Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi (paɪ) is a series of small single-board computers (SBCs) developed in the United Kingdom by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in association with Broadcom. The Raspberry Pi project originally leaned toward the promotion of teaching basic computer science in schools. The original model became more popular than anticipated, selling outside its target market for uses such as robotics. It is widely used in many areas, such as for weather monitoring, because of its low cost, modularity, and open design.
Musl
musl is a C standard library intended for operating systems based on the Linux kernel, released under the MIT License. It was developed by Rich Felker with the goal to write a clean, efficient, and standards-conformant libc implementation. musl was designed from scratch to allow efficient static linking and to have realtime-quality robustness by avoiding race conditions, internal failures on resource exhaustion and various other bad worst-case behaviors present in existing implementations.
Show more

Graph Chatbot

Chat with Graph Search

Ask any question about EPFL courses, lectures, exercises, research, news, etc. or try the example questions below.

DISCLAIMER: The Graph Chatbot is not programmed to provide explicit or categorical answers to your questions. Rather, it transforms your questions into API requests that are distributed across the various IT services officially administered by EPFL. Its purpose is solely to collect and recommend relevant references to content that you can explore to help you answer your questions.