Differences between stal/IX and regular Linux

Summary

stal/IX This document contains a regularly updated list of differences between stal/IX and regular Linux. Minimalism “UNIX is simple and coherent…” - Dennis Ritchie “GNU’s Not UNIX” - Richard Stallman stal/IX is not UNIX or Linux in the usual sense of these terms. stal/IX is an attempt to rethink some fundamentals without touching the Linux API and ABI. One of the goals of stal/IX is to build the system from the ground up in such a way that it is easy to understand how it works, not just easy to use. https://wiki.musl-libc.org/alternatives.html https://github.com/illiliti/libudev-zero https://busybox.net/tinyutils.html https://connortumbleson.com/2022/11/28/open-source-saying-no/ No FHS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard FS.md In general, the file system will be familiar to those who know Nix/Guix. Atomic updates, multiversioning - it’s all here! No systemd https://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2020/05/02/0/ https://www.phoronix.com/news/systemd-Git-Stats-2022 Currently, stal/IX uses a custom init as the most lightweight solution. It formerly used runit, but it was too hard with the content-addressable store. Musl https://drewdevault.com/2020/09/25/A-story-of-two-libcs.html https://codebrowser.dev/glibc/glibc/nptl/pthread_cancel.c.html#99 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Glibc-2.36-EAC-Problems https://ariadne.space/2021/12/29/glibc-is-still-not-y2038-compliant-by-default/ Glibc does not fully support static linking. stal/IX uses musl internally and allows userland software to be built with an arbitrary libc of choice. Non-root package management IX.md All files on the system are owned by user IX, and all package management is performed on its behalf. Consequently, there is not a single suid binary file in the system. Sudo is a thin layer over the local ssh daemon, to increase privileges. Fully supervised process tree Every process other than init has a parent other than init. All processes that do not meet this requirement are terminated by a ...