> It's an observation. I didn't intend for it to be alarmist, if you interpreted it that way then perhaps I could have worded it differently.
Alarmist is perhaps the wrong word. What I mean is that this is a very strange and high bar for choosing a distro. You aren't "suffering a penalty by using alpine," you're being a beta tester by using a non-LTS ubuntu with a bunch of random flags on or whatever. You can also just.. use a different kernel version with alpine (or whatever distro), no one's stopping you.
> It's been in the kernel since 2017 (the article noted kernel 4.13 which was released 2017 when I looked it up). That doesn't seem very bleeding edge to me.
You can't actually use the version in 4.13 though, you need at least 4.17, because apparently that's what openssl 3.0.0 requires.
Now 4.17 has been around for a while too! But you also need openssl 3.0.0 to make practical use of it, and that's only been out since sept 2021. And also had a massive number of breaking changes.
And then you have to be using a newer kernel version than that to get tlsv3 ciphers apparently. Looks like somewhere around 5.10, though it doesn't explicitly say in the article afaict. If you don't use that then maybe you're gaining some speed but you're also downgrading your security.
And then you need to use bleeding edge nginx and manually compile that against openssl3.
So yeah. It's technically been there for years. But in practical terms no one (or very few people at least) have been using it in anger until the last few months. A new syscall in linux is "bleeding edge" for a while.
Honestly the kernel is the least of your concerns here.