Small but mighty update will help its many users – even the unwitting ones
The latest update to the ultra-lightweight Alpine Linux distro, as widely used for hosting Docker containers, fixes an important issue.
There are many relatively small new features in Alpine 3.18, but one of them, while niche, could prove significant. One of several unusual things about Alpine Linux is that it doesn’t use glibc, the standard C library that is the basis of almost all other Linux distros. Instead, Alpine is based on the smaller, lighter Musl libc.
For many years, and by design, Musl did not support DNS over TCP, only over UDP.
This has caused some Alpine users much consternation, and that has led some people to turn against Alpine. Well, no more: DNS over TCP is now supported in Musl 1.2.4, meaning that it also works in Alpine 3.18.
Other than being a non-glibc-based distro, Alpine Linux is a member of several minorities among Linux distributions: it’s minimalist; it’s very lightweight; it’s systemd-free; and it still supports x86-32 as a first-class platform, alongside x86-64, plus ARMv7, ARM64, PPC64LE, and S390X. There are native versions for several models of Raspberry Pi, as well as for running in VMs, plus a version for Xen which can run in dom0, meaning that it can host the hypervisor.
Perhaps the most most unusual aspect is that although Alpine is quite widely used, there’s a good chance that many of its users don’t realize that they’re using it.
