Alpine Linux version 3.6 has been released. Alpine Linux is built around musl libc and busybox. This makes it smaller and more resource efficient than traditional GNU/Linux distributions. A container requires no more than 8 MB, and a minimal installation to disk requires around 130 MB of storage. Not only do you get a fully-fledged Linux environment but a large selection of packages from the repository. Alpine Linux was designed with security in mind. The kernel is patched with an unofficial port of grsecurity/PaX, and all userland binaries are compiled as Position Independent Executables (PIE) with stack smashing protection. These proactive security features prevent exploitation of entire classes of zero-day and other vulnerabilities.
What’s new in Alpine Linux 3.6.0?
- Support for 64-bit little-endian POWER machines (ppc64le)
- Support for 64-bit IBM z Systems (s390x)
- Rust 1.17.0 and Cargo 0.18.0
- GHC 8.0.2
- Julia 0.5.2
- GCC 6.3
- LLVM 4.0
- PHP 7.1
- Go 1.8
- Python 3.6
- LuaJIT 2.1beta3
- nginx 1.12
- Ruby 2.4
How do I upgrade Alpine Linux from version 3.5 to 3.6?
You can simply use the apk command command to update. First find an old text version number such as 3.5 and replace with 3.6 using the sed command:
# cat /etc/alpine-release
## [ if you are using 3.5 version ] ##
# sed -i 's/3.5/3.6/g' /etc/apk/repositories
## [ if you are using 3.4 version ] ##
# sed -i 's/3.4/3.6/g' /etc/apk/repositories
# apk update
# apk upgrade --available
# reboot
Use the cat command to verify update:
# cat /etc/alpine-release
Sample outputs:
3.6.0