Alpine Linux 3.21 Released with Linux Kernel 6.12 LTS, Initial LoongArch64 Support

The Alpine Linux team

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Starting with this release, the

Under the hood, the new Alpine Linux release has up-to-date components, including GCC 14, LLVM 19, Node.js 20.11 LTS, Rust 1.83, Crystal 1.14, Go 1.23, PHP 8.4, Qt 6.8, and .NET 9.0.

Alpine Linux 3.21 is available for download right now from the

Existing Alpine Linux users can upgrade their installations using the default package management system by running the

Alpine Linux is a security-oriented and lightweight Linux-based distribution based on the musl C standard library and the BusyBox software suite that provides several Unix utilities in a single executable file. It doesn’t have a specific graphical environment by default, allowing users to customize their installations fully.

Alpine Linux uses OpenRC as the default init system, a dependency-based init system for Unix-like operating systems that maintains compatibility with the system-provided init system.