[gentoo-dev] New Project: Hardened musl

["Anthony G. Basile" <blueness@gentoo.org>]

Hi everyone,

I'd like to announce a new subproject of Hardened Gentoo, Hardened musl 
[1].  musl is a new C standard library, optimized for embedded systems.  
It is "lightweight, fast, simple, free, and strives to be correct in the 
sense of standards-conformance and safety."  [2] Like its sister 
subproject, Hardened uClibc [3], this project focuses on porting both 
userland and kernel hardening to musl based systems for a variety of 
architectures, treating musl as a drop in alternative to glibc.  The 
releases are not "embedded" in the sense that most userland utilities 
are provided by busybox; rather, we make use of coreutils, util-linux, 
and other typical GNU utilities that you'd find on any regular Gentoo 
system.

The release images are stage3 tarballs built using catalyst and our 
automation scripts [4].  Unlike the uClibc project where most packages 
"just build", musl's adherence to standards means that many packages 
need some minor patching. These are kept on our hardened-dev overlay in 
the musl branch [5].

This is work in progress.  The following table gives a brief summary of 
the current state of affairs:

Arch            Subarch            ABI(s) Flavors                  Status
amd64        Generic             default 64-bit hardened/vanilla   stage3
arm             armv7a             eabi hardened/vanilla   stage3
mips            mips32r2          o32 vanilla                  <in progress>
mips            mipsel3             o32 vanilla                  stage3
x86             i686                  default 32-bit vanilla             
      stage3


These are available on the mirrors at ${MIRROR}/expiermental/${ARCH}/musl.


Contributors:
Felix Janda <felix.janda@posteo.de>


References:
[1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Hardened_musl

[2] http://www.musl-libc.org/

[3] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Hardened_uClibc

[4] 
http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/releng.git;a=tree;f=tools-musl

[5] 
http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/hardened-dev.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/musl

-- 
Anthony G. Basile, Ph.D.
Gentoo Linux Developer [Hardened]
E-Mail    : blueness@gentoo.org
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