Starch Linux: OpenBSD Atop Arch's Linux Kernel

Earlier this week I wrote about Arch BSD: a new operating system that is based upon Arch Linux but in place of the Linux kernel is FreeBSD's kernel. To talk about today is Starch Linux, a distribution also derived from Arch but its approach is the opposite. Starch Linux still runs off Arch's Linux kernel but it has an OpenBSD user-space.

A Phoronix reader brought up Starch Linux in the Arch BSD discussion as basically being a reverse implementation. Starch Linux is basically OpenBSD atop the Linux kernel where as Arch BSD is Arch atop the FreeBSD kernel. Aside from pulling in the OpenBSD packages, differing it further is that it uses the musl libc standard library.

The musl standard library is designed to be lightweight, fast, simple, free, and provide proper standard-conformance and safety. The musl library is lighter than uclibc and eglibc while competitive with dietlibc. The performance of musl is also known to be quite good compared to the alternative standard libraries.

At the moment there is no official Starch Linux installer but rather users must install Arch Linux and then modify their pacman package manager configuration to point towards the Starch Linux mirrors to install their core and extra packages.

While not yet distributed as its full, own operating system, Starch Linux is nearing the point of its own self-hosted build.

More information on this interesting OpenBSD/Linux distribution can be found at StarchLinux.org.