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Message-ID: <55D3E08F.1010309@opensource.dyc.edu>
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2015 21:49:03 -0400
From: "Anthony G. Basile" <basile@...nsource.dyc.edu>
To: musl@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: A full Gentoo desktop system built with musl
Hi everyone,
I want to announce to the list that I've built and will be maintaining
three hardened, fully featured XFCE4 Gentoo desktop systems for amd64,
each based on glibc, uClibc and musl respectively. These are
affectionately called Bluemoon (glibc), Lilblue (uClibc) and Bluedragon
(musl) Gentoo Linux. You can download them from the release site [1]
where you'll find links to their home pages and how to install and
maintain them. Except for their libc and some minor details here and
there, I've tried to make them as identical as possible. They should
not be thought of as embedded in that they do not use busybox to provide
the system utilities. Rather they employ all the usual packages you'd
find on any regular Linux desktop. The are also "hardened" meaning that
they are built with our gcc specs which turn on ssp, pie, relro, bind
now and stack check by default, and they use a PaX/Grsecurity patched
kernel with all practical security features turned on.
In addition to the release tarballs, I'm also providing about 5000 extra
packages. Gentoo is a "from source" distribution and you can always try
to build packages from source on your local system, but Gentoo also
provides the possibility of using pre-compiled packages made available
from a binary package host (BINHOST). The package set for each system
is at links [2], [3] and [4]. Also, these systems can be maintained
like any other Gentoo system using portage and emerge, but I've also
written a new release engineering tool that allows the end user to
easily maintain each by tracking a "reference" system defined upstream.
You can read about the "Gentoo Reference System" suite at link [5].
Its a long document so you may want to read just the Intro and Quickstart.
The main reasons for building these systems was to 1) facilitate
comparisons between the three libc's and 2) to push the limits of each
to see what breaks, and then fix either the packages or the libc itself.
To this end, the GRS suite also acts like a poor-man's tinderbox and
provides build logs for packages which have failed. These can be seen
at links [6], [7] and [8]. Nonetheless, the systems are "useful". The
release tarballs come with abiword, gnumeric, the gimp, eog, hexchat,
mplayer and smplayer, midori web browser, claws-mail, and there are many
more packages on the BINHOST. The glibc and uClibc are polished and
work pretty much bug free. You'd expect that since the entire Gentoo
community works with Gentoo+glibc, and I've been working at
Gentoo+uClibc for a while fixing things. However the musl desktop is
the newest addition and it does have some issues. In particular, the
charset is messed up and I have yet to clean that up for the next
release. For reasons I don't understand yet I'm getting Japanese
characters sometimes.
Contribute if you can. You can open bugs on http://bugs.gentoo.org.
Mention that you're working with musl and not glibc and ask that the bug
be assigned to <blueness@...too.org>.
[1] http://releases.freeharbor.net/
[2] http://bluemoon.freeharbor.net
[3] http://lilblue.freeharbor.net
[4] http://bluedragon.freeharbor.net
[5] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:RelEng_GRS
[6] http://bluemoon-tinderbox.freeharbor.net
[7] http://lilblue-tinderbox.freeharbor.net
[8] http://bluedragon-tinderbox.freeharbor.net
--
Anthony G. Basile, Ph. D.
Chair of Information Technology
D'Youville College
Buffalo, NY 14201
(716) 829-8197
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