Alpine Linux in Dom0

General Discussion
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One year or two years ago I hear that was one idea about change Fedora in Dom0 to Alpine Linux and what is the state now? That was great idea and I really sad about this that current Qubes OS 4.1 wasn’t base on Alpine. Alpine have longest release cycle and is faster, smaller and more secure than Fedora. In systems like Qubes fast Dom0 is really important.

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Yes, I’ve seen it. But nowhere was there a clear opinion on what will be with Dom0. Something will be with changes or not. There were a lot of entries about everything and about nothing, but no specifics like “We are not changing for the next 5 years” or “We are just working on a change”.

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no specifics

My impression from this and other threads is:

  1. the core team works on moving more and more hardware handling into dedicated qubes (increased security through compartmentalization): sys-net, sys-usb, sys-audio, sys-gui, …?

  2. the distribution used in system qubes is up to the user (to a certain degree, based on what is officially supported and what the skill level of the user is to go beyond that).

  3. eventually dom0 will have little left to do, at which point dom0 might migrate to a minimal build potentially maintained by the Qubes OS team in it’s entirety

  4. there is no specific time frame, but a clear process / direction

  5. given the above, repeated threads proposing various distributions for dom0 are distractions and bring little value: there won’t be any switch in the short-term and long-term the whole discussion becomes irrelevant.

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This was my impression as well, at least there would be a sys-gui before changing dom0 OS. Since sys-gui is still experimental even in the final R4.1 release, it might still take quite a while for it to become stable/default. And even then maybe they want dedicated audio and disk qubes first before switching.

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Thanks for clarification :smiley:

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We will surely consider switching the distro when we implement GUI
domain. It is on out roadmap and depends on GPU passthrough, which
does not currently work, at least not without patching Xen and libvirt.
We this it will be hard enough, and the effort should be directed there.

When switching, it will be neither Fedora nor Debian or any general
purpose distro, but something very minimal, like Alpine.

Cool to see Alpine was being considered for dom0 role.

I recently became aware of Alpine, and its minimal system resource usage, and its other system hardening modifications got my attention.
https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Alpine_newbie

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How close is this particular project to migrate from fedora over to Alpine Linux?

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No other distro, but self developed as minimal as possible will ever happened. It looks obvious, to me at least.

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What?

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I had never touched Alpine, first download was at 19:01 PST. Now it’s 19:55, I’ve got it running on VirtualBox, Proxmox, and I get why people are excited about seeing something like this for Qubes dom0.

But I defer to the project managers on how and when they will make a change there. And I agree that endlessly chattering about this is pointless. There are no doubt many other priorities, and I suspect using the Fedora install procedure to bootstrap, then replacing the installed OS with Alpine, is non-trivial.

And on that note, I am off to play with this wonderful new toy …

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