The AlpineBSD project develops an operating system in which a user environment based on the developments of the Alpine Linux distribution runs on top of the NetBSD kernel. In addition to the NetBSD kernel, AlpineBSD uses the standard C library libc and a set of low-level utilities such as mount. The basic set of utilities is based on the BusyBox toolkit, and application packages are used from Alpine Linux whenever possible. The apk package manager is used for package management and s6 is used as the init system, but plans mention providing support for OpenRC as an alternative.
The project has a strong policy regarding AI and tries, as much as possible, not to use software containing AI-generated code.
AI-generated components are not allowed to be included in the base system or the main package repository. All packages, including code, documentation, binaries and other resources created through AI, are marked with a special label and distributed through a separate repository “tainted”. The use of AI tools is also prohibited during the AlpineBSD development process.
AlpineBSD does not yet have a separate installer and installation assemblies. To test the project it is suggested to boot from the NetBSD installation media, then download the apk package manager assembly, add repositories, install apk packages and configure the s6 init system.