Serpent OS Infrastructure & Tooling Almost Completed

Back during the summer was news that Ikey Doherty was going to work full-time on Serpent OS, a new Linux distribution he started. Ikey Doherty as a reminder previously created the Solus Linux distribution, worked for Intel on Clear Linux, and has other software accomplishments to his name. It's been a quiet few months for Serpent OS but it turns out they've been busy establishing their build infrastructure and tooling.

Serpent OS is to be a modern Linux distribution that is highly optimized for today's hardware and to effectively take a fresh look at the operating system stack. But since Ikey's June announcement of returning to work full-time on Serpent OS, there hasn't been any major news while it turns out they have been busy on getting ready their own build infrastructure and tooling from scratch.

Serpent's infrastructure is nearing the testing phase, approaching the point that developers can submit and build new packages for the Serpent OS repo, and can then focus on "the bring-up of Serpent OS."

There is out a new Serpent blog post outlining their build infrastructure and tooling work for those interested.

It's great with their infrastructure they are working on it with x86_64 feature ISA levels in mind. They plan to leverage the x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels to be able to provide optimized packages for newer Intel/AMD processors. The post noted:

Feature work has started on adding ISA levels to enable support for adding x86-64-v3x packages. This can provide extra performance and reduced power use for supported CPUs (this denotes the x86-64-v3 psABI with some extra extensions that your processor will likely also include). As we aren't relying on the glibc hwcaps feature, we have the ability to adjust the featureset to the benefit of our users. Once we have a x86-64-v4 builder available, we can also look at providing an extra layer for packages that heavily utilise math. This will be the result of actual benchmarks to indicate which packages provide additional performance from their newer CPU features.

It will be very interesting to see what other feature work is pursued by Serpent OS as we move into 2023.