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Comment by wonks | Hacker News Reader

I see it uses busybox. Does this mean it's for low-spec instances and embedded devices, or did they base it on busybox because shellshock only affected GNU Bash and they felt the GNU tools couldn't be trusted anymore?

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If you need non busybox things, just install them and they replace the busybox version automatically. If you don't then leave it minimal.

It is mainly about size on the base install, long before shellshock. Many use cases only need basic tools, eg configuring the Alpine system itself.

It's used a lot as a guest os useland and init inside docker deployments, becuase it's very small. This means you can run a lot of docker images in one machine if you use alpine inside them, fully loaded alpine docker base is about 8mb.

The thing about docker is that the containers are thin provisioned, you can run as many containers based on 8GB images if you have the spare 8GB for the base image. Still, bloat is to be avoided so Alpine as a base image is a great idea.

And the 8GB for the next version of the base system and so on, base system updates are fairly frequent.

Wanted to do network lab using VirtualBox VMS. Used archlinux iso images at first but they require 256MB of ram to boot IIRC. I stumbled upon alpine linux. I think I booted some with 64MB only. Enough for DNS and DHCP tutorials.

The thing I've liked about this is that bloat isn't just about size.

If you have no reason to interact with the userland tools inside a Docker container, you similarly have no reason to introduce their complexity and attack surface in a container designed to run one service.

My current "minimal" installation shows 25 SUID binaries (a large amount of them being systemd related...) and my server services need very few of these.

If you're that concerned about bloat, you can use the scratch image to start from a completely empty rootfs.

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