The open source community has received Alpine Linux 3.6. The new version includes a list of security features that helps to prevent exploitation of entire classes of zero-day and other major vulnerabilities.
The new Alpine Linux is designed with musl libc and busybox that reduce its size and make the experience resource efficient. There is also a patch for an unofficial port of grsecurity/PaX, and the Linux platform has compiled all userland binaries as Position Independent Executables (PIE) with stack smashing protection to deliver a secure experience.
New software inclusions
Alongside the enhanced security, Alpine Linux 3.6.0 has some new updated software packages. There is Rust 1.17.0, Cargo 0.18.0, GHC 8.0.2 and Nginx 1.12. Additionally, the platform has a new set of programming languages that includes Julia 0.5.2, PHP 7.1, Go 1.8, Python 3.6 and Ruby 2.4.
You can upgrade to Alpine Linux 3.6 from its previous version by using the sed command in the terminal. It requires a minimum free space of 130MB on disk, while you can install its presence on a container with no more than 8MB storage.
