Add support for Alpine Linux

[Kiyoshi Aman]

Please implement support for ​Alpine Linux—like Gentoo, it uses OpenRC. However, it also uses a modified uClibc (implementing its own process ABI) and its own package format (similar to Arch's PKGBUILD) and package manager, as well as a Linux kernel patched for grsec and PaX.

I would be happy to assist in whatever manner I can (I'm a package maintainer).

[Michael Thayer]

Currently what does and what doesn't work? A patch suggestion would be welcome, bearing in mind that we prefer to avoid too many hacks for specific distributions, given the number of distributions out there.

[Kiyoshi Aman]

At the moment, none of the services work—they rely on flags which busybox-modprobe does not have. (I'd already modified the services to pretend they're running on Gentoo, due to the usage of openrc.)

[Michael Thayer]

I'm afraid that doesn't help me very much. A patch which changed the scripts to not depend on those flags might help more, although I would need to be sure it wouldn't break other systems. Not sure what the problem with modprobe is though - unless modprobe -c reports a particular configuration setting - which the busybox version is not likely to, given that it doesn't handle the "-c" option - modprobe will be called without flags for doing actual work.

[Kiyoshi Aman]

More relevantly: /sbin/functions.sh does not exist, which vboxadd-service depends on. X11 crashes when it attempts to load the vbox video driver (vboxadd-x11 doesn't print any errors when started prior to, mind).

[Michael Thayer]

If X11 crashes in the guest you might attach the files /etc/X11/xorg.conf (if it exists) and /var/log/Xorg.0.log from the guest, as well as mentioning what the symlinks /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/vboxvideo_drv.so and */input/vboxmouse_drv.so point to (adjust those paths if necessary).

[Michael Thayer]

Regarding /sbin/functions.sh, I could imagine making changes to the init scripts to make them support OpenRC rather than Gentoo if I were sure that the changes would not break current or old versions of Gentoo.

[Kiyoshi Aman]

​X11 log file — /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/vboxvideo_drv.so pointed to /usr/lib/VBoxGuestAdditions/vboxvideo_drv_110.so, but replacing the symlink with it didn't help either.

I have a question, though; are the drivers in VBoxGuestAdditions built against glibc? If so, that would probably explain why they don't work—uClibc is not binary-compatible with glibc (but a simple recompile against uClibc should work, unless they also use glibc extensions).

[Michael Thayer]

I'm afraid that everything is built against glibc. I'm also afraid that that is not something that we will be able to change in the near future if at all - your best bet might be to build the Additions yourself. Of course we would still be interested in other reasons why it doesn't work as long as they can be fixed without collateral damage elsewhere.