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Linux Alternatives
Similar projects and alternatives to linux
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InfluxDB
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src
Read-only git conversion of OpenBSD's official CVS src repository. Pull requests not accepted - send diffs to the tech@ mailing list.
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
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llvm-project
The LLVM Project is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies.
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Git
Git Source Code Mirror - This is a publish-only repository but pull requests can be turned into patches to the mailing list via GitGitGadget (https://gitgitgadget.github.io/). Please follow Documentation/SubmittingPatches procedure for any of your improvements.
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freebsd-src
The FreeBSD src tree publish-only repository. Experimenting with 'simple' pull requests....
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
linux discussion
linux reviews and mentions
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Firefox Moves to GitHub
What is the source of “Firefox Moves to GitHub”? It could just be a mirror, just like Linux also has an official mirror on GitHub.
https://github.com/torvalds/linux
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Armbian Updates: OMV support, boot improvents, Rockchip optimizations
It's basically the same in the x86 world : your bios is customised to the board
The sad part is that on ARM the kernel is usually also custom compiled for the board.
If you go and look in https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/arch/arm you see a zillion "mach-xxx" directories for different SoC architectures, even if they all use Arm.
Device-tree is a partial solution, but no-one seems to have an incentive to finish the job and let a single image run on any (sufficiently recent) arm board. It's difficult for the community to fix because most people have only their own board. Someone would need to pay for a CI rig with every board, and some kernel devs to do the work of building a single kernel to run across everything.
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Why Linux is my favorite OS and how start?
Linux is a open source OS Kernel Unix based created by Linus Torvals in 1997 and released on GitHub and this OS turn so popular because is 100% free to download, make your own OS called Distro(Distribution or Linux Distribution) and every Distro are ruled to be Free and a lot of Linux based Distros was make, the most popular is :
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Path Isn't Real on Linux
This is even reflected in the ELF format itself. There's this really arcane dichotomy between sections and segments.
Sections are very detailed metadata that all sorts of things use for all sorts of purposes. Compilers use them. Debuggers use them. Static and dynamic linkers use them. Anyone can use them for any purpose whatsoever. You can easily add your own custom sections to any executable using tools like objcopy. It's completely arbitrary, held together by convention.
Segments, on the other hand, don't even have names. They are just a list of file extents required for the program to actually execute and their address space locations. The program header table is essentially a sorted list of arguments for the mmap system call.
This is Linux kernel's ELF loader:
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/fs/binfmt_elf....
It basically just mmaps in all of the PT_LOAD segments of the ELF file, copies stuff like arguments and environment and then starts a thread at the entry point specified in the ELF header.
It's just that when loading dynamic ELFs it jumps into the dynamic linker, not the actual program. It's as though every single program had a #!/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 shebang line. The absolute path is even hardcoded into the executable itself.
readelf -a $(which cat) | grep -i interpreter
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Why Does My eBPF Program Work on One Kernel but Fail on Another?
Yeah same, we maintain some eBPF probes spanning 4.11 to latest kernel, and holy hell, it's really bad. The worst offender being some old RedHat kernels with half-baked backports of the eBPF features containing a bunch of weird bugs or features that aren't perfectly in line with what's used in mainline...
Here's a fun bug we recently had: we had to ban substractions in our program (replacing them with an __asm__ macro) because of a bug in linux kernel 5.7.0 to 5.10.10, which had the (indirect) impact of not properly tracking the valid min/max values in the verifier[0]. The worst part is, it didn't cause the verifier to reject our program outright - instead, it used that information to optimize out some branches it thought were never reachable, making for some really wonky to debug situation where the program was running an impossible control-flow[1], resulting in it returning garbage to user-space.
All this to say, CORE is really only half the problem. Supporting every kernel in existance is still a huge effort. Still worth it compared to the alternative of writing a linux kernel driver though!
[0]: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/bc895e8b2a64e502fbb...
[1]: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/bc895e8b2a64e502fbba7...
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Show HN: Gitterbugs, an ultra fast and lightweight GitHub repo mapper
I built a fast tree builder for any public GitHub repo via the linux shell.
`gitterbugs` (gbgs) clones, analyzes and renders a beautiful, readable and size-annotated tree of any GitHub repository in seconds.
For example, `gbgs https://github.com/torvalds/linux` produces:
```
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Important open source projects should not use GitHub (2020)
> Anyone has seen his position on this topic?
Well, he's not a fan of GitHub pull request as per the last decade.
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56546...
- Intel: A Bug and a Pro – By Bradford Morgan White
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I stopped everything and started writing C again
Might not.
Rust has a state of the art sort implementation. There’s nothing faster, in any language - https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/124032.
And sure, it’s possible that someone could write a C program that compares in speed to all the Rust programs I’ve mentioned. C is a Turing complete language after all. I’m only pointing out that it hasn’t happened in practice.
Also check the Android Binder code before (C https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/androi...) and after (Rust - https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/native/...). Same speed but the quality difference, it’s incomparable.
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Rewriting essential Linux packages in Rust
> I wonder if Linux is re-written i(n) (sic) rust will it too remove GPL as a factor ?
No reason it must? AFAIK all Rust for Linux code is GPL2. For example see: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/rust/kernel/al...
If some was or were to be licensed as MIT code, there is also plenty of dual licensed code in the Linux kernel.
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A note from our sponsor - InfluxDB
www.influxdata.com | 21 May 2025
Stats
torvalds/linux is an open source project licensed under GNU General Public License v3.0 or later which is an OSI approved license.
The primary programming language of linux is C.
Review ★★★★☆ 8/10
This project is a workhorse and it is really easy to overlook how much effort it takes to maintain this project.
Review ★★★★★ 10/10