On December 5th, Alpine Linux, an important operating system distribution community in the open source software world and cloud computing field, officially released the latest version 3.21（http://www.alpinelinux.org/posts/Alpine-3.21.0-released.html）, achieving native support for the LoongArch in a complete system form, which will effectively promote the ecological construction and application expansion of the LoongArch in the cloud computing field.
Alpine Linux is one of the most important infrastructures in the field of cloud computing. In today's cloud computing environment built based on container images, due to its security and resource efficiency characteristics, Alpine Linux is chosen by the majority of open source software communities and developers as the basic container operating system image. In the software projects managed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), most of them choose Alpine Linux as the basic container image. With the official release of the Alpine Linux LoongArch version, the basic software in the cloud computing field can directly build the LoongArch container image based on Alpine, which greatly facilitates the construction, release and application-side development and deployment of the LoongArch mirror of open source software.
The release of Alpine 3.21 is also a comprehensive display of the open source software ecosystem of the LoongArch. According to the data of the Alpine community, the Alpine 3.21 version integrates a total of 7,889 software packages, including important basic software such as Linux 6.12, Musl 1.2.5, GCC 14.2, LLVM 19, Rust 1.83, Go 1.23, OCaml 5, etc., and supports the installation of mainstream desktop environments such as KDE Plasma and Mate. The source code of all software packages comes from the latest version released by the upstream open source community, and the community native build of the whole system is completed on the LoongArch platform. This indicates that the support of the international open source software community for the LoongArch is very complete, and a complete operating system community distribution can be built based on the latest version of the international open source software community.
The release of the Alpine Linux LoongArch version has received strong support from teams such as the Technical Steering Committee and a large number of developers at home and abroad. Loongson Technology actively participated in the work of the Alpine Linux community, donated sufficient servers to the community, and completed the construction of continuous integration, automatic build and other processes. At present, the LoongArch software and hardware infrastructure of the Alpine community has been completed, and the work will turn to normal evolution and maintenance.
The official access addresses of Alpine 3.21 are as follows:
- Minirootfs acquisition：
http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.21/releases/loongarch64/alpine-minirootfs-3.21.0-loongarch64.tar.gz
- Standard ISO acquisition：
http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.21/releases/loongarch64/alpine-standard-3.21.0-loongarch64.iso
More information can be found at：
- Alpine official wiki：
http://wiki.alpinelinux.org/
- Alpine official 3.21.0 release notes：
http://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Release_Notes_for_Alpine_3.21.0
- Alpine official mirrors：
http://mirrors.alpinelinux.org/
