Alpine Linux 3.21 Released With Linux 6.12 & GCC 14, LoongArch CPU Support

Alpine Linux 3.21 is out today as the newest version of this simple, lightweight, and security-minded Linux distribution that is popular for use within containerized environments, embedded systems, and more.

Alpine Linux 3.21 is the newest feature release to this musl libc + BusyBox + OpenRC-based Linux distribution.Alpine Linux 3.21 upgrades the operating system to using the Linux 6.12 stable kernel, GCC 14 and LLVM 19 as the compiler toolchain components, and other upgrades such as Node.js 22.11, Go 1.23, PHP 8.4, and .NET 9.0. For those using Alpine Linux as a desktop Linux platform, GNOME 47 and KDE Plasma 6.2 and Sway 1.10 are among the desktop options.

Beyond many package upgrades, Alpine Linux 3.21 is the first version of the distribution to ship with LoongArch 64-bit CPU support for those Chinese processors from Loongson.

Alpine Linux 3.21 also brings preparations for the /usr merge, linux-firmware binaries are now compressed using Zstd compression, and various other changes.

Downloads and more details on today's Alpine Linux 3.21 release via AlpineLinux.org.