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Garden Linux is a Debian derivate that aims to provide a small, auditable linux image for most Cloud Providers and Bare Metal.

• easy to use build system for OS images
• builds are repeatable and auditable
• small footprint (based on minbase of Debian)
• subscribes for debian/testing, so no huge (problematic) version jumps needed
• whole setup is purely systemd based (network, fstab etc.) #101 #102
• initramfs is dracut generated #105
• optional complete immutability #104
• regular updates (since the whole build process is completely automated via a Tekton CI) and
• thorough automated testing
  • unit tests against the local build and
  • integration tests against the various cloud Providers (only rc builds)
• aiming to always integrate the latest LTS kernel #100 (currently 5.4)
• running scans against common issues like
  • license voilations (we try to be completely open! #1)
  • scans for outdated software versions
• project licensed under MIT
• supporting major platforms out-of-the-box
  • major cloud providers AWS, Azure, Google, Alicloud
  • major virtualizer VMware, OpenStack, KVM
  • bare metal

The entire build runs in a docker container (well a privileged one with extended capabilities - since we need loop back support) We can run on any system supporting Docker and having loopback support and has

• 2+ GiB (use RAM-disk; use fs with sparse-file support)
• 10+ GiB free disk space
• Internet connection to access snapshot.debian.org and repo.gardenlinux.io

apt install bash docker.io docker-compose make coreutils gnupg git qemu-system-x86

apt install python3

• Alicloud: Aliyun CLI
• AWS: AWS CLI
• Azure: Azure CLI
• GCP: Cloud SDK, gsutil
• OpenStack: OpenStackCLI

ext4, loop, squashfs, vfat, vsock (for VM image builds and extended virtualized tests)

apt install bash git python

pip install tekton

Build all images:

make all

Building specific platform images:

make aws
make gcp
make azure
make ali
make vmware
make openstack
make kvm
make metal

See in .build/ folder for the outcome, there are subdirectories for the platform and the build date.

Our build is based on a feature system.

The feature system distinguishes between

• Platforms (aws, azure, google ...)
• Features (container host, virtual host ...)
• Modifiers (_slim. _readonly, _pxe ...)

if you want to manually build choose:

build.sh <Platform>,[<feature1>],[<featureX>],[_modifier1],[_modifierX] destination [version]

e.g. build.sh server,cloud,chost,vmware build/

builds a server image, cloud-like, with a container host for the VMware platform. The build result can be found in build/

also look into our Version scheme since adding a date or a Version targets the whole build for a specific date

Garden Linux frequently publishes snapshot releases. These are available as machine images in most major cloud providers as well as file-system images for manual import. See the releases page for more info.

Garden Linux can build in an automated way for continous integration. See ci/README.md for details.