The new release includes GCC 6.4, LLVM 5.0, and Go 1.9

Dec 4, 2017 16:08 GMT  ·  By

Alpine Linux, a security-oriented and lightweight GNU/Linux distribution based on musl libc and BusyBox, has been updated recently to version 3.7.

Alpine Linux 3.7.0 comes six months after the 3.6 series, which received only two maintenance updates during its release cycle, and it's a major release that introduces support for UEFI machines, as well as support for the GRUB bootloader in the installer.

Many of the distro's core components have been updated to new versions, and Alpine Linux 3.7.0 ships with the Linux 4.9.65 LTS kernel, GCC 6.4 and LLVM 5.0 compilers, Rust 1.22 and Go 1.9 programming languages, as well as Node.js 8.9 LTS, Perl 5.26, and latest PostgreSQL 10 database engine.

The first in the 3.7 stable series

Alpine Linux 3.7.0 is the first in the 3.7 stable series of the independently-developed operating system primarily targeted at power users and advanced Linux users who appreciate security, resource efficiency, and simplicity.

The operating system uses a hardened kernel and compiles all userspace binaries as position-independent executables. You can download the Alpine Linux 3.7.0 ISO images for various of the supported architectures right now through our web portal.

Existing Alpine Linux 3.6.x users can upgrade to Alpine Linux 3.7.0 as we speak, but those who want to deploy the operating system on new computers will have to grab the ISO images. More details on the changes implemented in this release are available here.

Alpine Linux is also one of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions in the Docker Hub, where it is supported on 32-bit (i386), 64-bit (amd64), 32-bit ARMv6, 64-bit ARMv8, PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian (ppc64le), and IBM System z (s390x) architectures.