20230428

What’s new?

This release is a modest attempt to follow a regular release cycle for glaucus.

A summary of changes that took place:

• radula was rewritten in Nim (previous version was in Rust), reasons for this include:
  • code is reasonably more readable (more so than the Rust version)
  • much less LOC even with more features added (compared to the Rust version)
  • code is written in a reasonable amount of time (much less than Rust version, again the rewrite itself took about a month, but the speed at which newer features were added is like 4 - 8 times faster than in Rust, probably because I am not proficient in Rust even after a year of using it…)
  • uses less system resources (1/3 of what the Rust version uses)
  • much smaller executable size (200 to 300 KB) (compared to the Rust version 3 MB)
  • can be built using glaucus’s existing toolchain because Nim transpiles to C; thus, making use of the optimized toolchain glaucus uses (unlike Rust which is very hard to bootstrap, and does not work all that great with shared musl…)
  • slightly faster (parsing cerata is around 6 - 20% faster overall) (this is probably because I am not proficient with Rust even after a year of using it, but then again I’ve only been writing in Nim for a month…)
• glaucus’s toolchain now uses mold by default, and all executables (with the exception of the Linux kernel) are being linked with it
• glaucus now uses yash as the default shell for interactive use instead of oksh for the following reasons:
  • more strict POSIX compliance compared to oksh
  • much more user friendly compared to oksh
  • about 50% the size of bash and only slightly bigger (10 - 20%) than oksh
  • about 30 - 40% faster than bash and has identical performance to oksh and loksh
  • multiline support, which is not available in oksh
• glaucus now uses OpenBSD M4 as the default M4 implementation
• glaucus now uses BLAKE3 as the default hashing algorithm instead of SHA-512
• Update default ASCII art
• Updated cerata

This release is more stable compared to previous releases but it still is not production ready.

Included cerata (91 packages)

This release contains the following cerata:

• acl
• attr
• autoconf
• automake
• bc
• binutils
• byacc
• bzip2
• ccache
• cerata
• curl
• dash
• diffutils
• e2fsprogs
• eudev
• execline
• expat
• file
• findutils
• flex
• gcc
• grep
• help2man
• hwdata
• hydroskeleton
• iana-etc
• iproute2
• iputils
• kmod
• lbzip2
• lbzip2-utils
• less
• libarchive
• libcap
• libcap-ng
• libedit
• libelf
• libressl
• libtool
• libuargp
• libucontext
• linux
• linux-headers
• lz4
• lzlib
• make
• mandoc
• mawk
• mimalloc
• mold
• musl
• musl-fts
• musl-locales
• musl-obstack
• musl-rpmatch
• musl-utils
• netbsd-curses
• nsss
• om4
• patch
• pciutils
• pcre2
• pigz
• pkgconf
• plocate
• plzip
• procps-ng
• psmisc
• radula
• rsync
• s6
• s6-boot-scripts
• s6-linux-init
• s6-rc
• samurai
• sdhcp
• sed
• shadow
• skalibs
• toybox
• tzcode
• tzdata
• util-linux
• utmps
• vim
• wget2
• xxhash
• xz
• yash
• zlib-ng
• zstd

b3sum glaucus-s6-x86-64-v3-28042023.img.zst

2c82179413c926eb38be96279e410ead7e80cabb0b8066a3fa45aade423aa360

How to run?

Extract glaucus-s6-x86-64-v3-28042023.img.zst

tar --use-compress-program 'zstd -d --long=31' -xvf glaucus-s6-x86-64-v3-28042023.img.zst -C .

Run via QEMU

qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -cpu host -hda glaucus-s6-x86-64-v3-28042023.img -m 256M

You’ll be automatically logged in as root.

To access additional ttys use ALT + arrow keys Right/Left, and use the password glaucus.