It includes GCC 6.3, PHP 7.1, Go 1.8 and Python 3.6

May 25, 2017 02:02 GMT  ·  By

Natanael Copa, the developer of Alpine Linux, an open-source security-oriented GNU/Linux distribution based on BusyBox and musl libc, was proud to announce today the release and immediate availability of Alpine Linux 3.6.0.

Alpine Linux 3.6 is a major milestone that includes a lot of new features, some of the latest GNU/Linux technologies and open source projects, as well as dozens of under-the-hood improvements. The biggest new feature appears to be support for 64-bit little-endian POWER (PPC64le) and IBM z Systems (s390x) architectures.

Updated components include GCC 6.3, LLVM 4.0, Python 3.6, Rust 1.17.0, Ruby 2.4, Go 1.8, GHC 8.0.2, Cargo 0.18.0, Julia 0.5.2, PHP 7.1, nginx 1.12, and LuaJIT 2.1 Beta 3. It is important to notice here that the name of the shipped llvm package has been changed to llvm4 and the "-grsec" kernel packages were renamed to "-hardened."

Powered by the long-term supported Linux 4.9 kernel series

Among other noteworthy changes implemented in Alpine Linux 3.6, we can mention that support for both SHA-1 and MD5 hashes was removed from APKBUILDs as SHA-512 hashes are now used. Additionally, set -e is now being used in APKBUILDs, which ship with a new check() function.

"A check() function has been added to APKBUILDs that allows packages to run test suites after build(), ensuring no regressions have occurred. This has been implemented for a number of packages, and policy onward will be to have them either be present or explicitly opted-out of with good reasoning," said the dev.

Alpine Linux 3.6.0 is distributed with the usual flavors that you can download right now from our website. Of course, existing users can upgrade from version 3.6.x or a previous release using the built-in package manager. This version is powered by the long-term supported Linux 4.9 kernel, specifically Linux 4.9.29.