Alpine Linux 3.22 swaps out Gummiboot for systemd-efistub and makes several improvements

Alpine Linux 3.22 is out now. If this is your first time hearing about it, Alpine's been around since 2005 and has built a name for itself as a lean, secure distro with an impressively small footprint, thanks to musl libc and BusyBox. This latest release brings some interesting changes, chief among them being a switch in how it handles Secure Boot.

The developers have decided to ditch Gummiboot, mainly because its upstream is basically defunct; it got absorbed by systemd a long time ago, meaning Gummiboot itself was not getting independent updates. Some users even reported that Gummiboot was not working right since Alpine 3.21. Now, for Secure Boot, Alpine is using systemd-efistub. Before you freak out about systemd creeping in, the team is quick to point out this is just the EFI stub files, not the whole init system. For most users, this transition should be smooth, automatically installing systemd-efistub, unless you have been messing with efistub_file in your secureboot configuration.

Beyond the UEFI boot manager shuffle, there are other notable updates. The apk-tools package manager, a key part of Alpine's snappy feel, is on its last run with version 2.14; the next big release, 3.23, will usher in apk-tools v3, though packages will still use the old format for now. KDE Plasma users should take note: the X11 session is gone, making Wayland your only option. This is a trend we are seeing more widely, so it is not a huge shocker. Also, nginx is now built with pcre2 instead of the older pcre.

Lots of packages got bumped, as you would expect, like the Linux kernel to 6.12, GCC to 14.2.0, LLVM to 20, and BusyBox itself to 1.37.0. Some components got the boot too: LXD is out in favor of Incus, and with Qt 5 support winding down by May 26, 2025, some Qt 5 libraries without users in the repository have been removed. The team also axed the portable C compiler (pcc) because its upstream has vanished, and ruby-grpc got cut because "GRPC is a huge mess."

You can read the full release notes here, and if you're interested in upgrading, be sure to consult this official guide.

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