Chimera Linux

The project is currently heavily WIP. It does not yet include a kernel or an init system, and the packaging is rough (both the build system and the templates themselves are in the state of flux).

Chimera is a Linux distribution with the following goals:

• Built entirely with LLVM
• No GNU components in base system
• FreeBSD-based userland
• Binary packaging based, with a fast source build system
• Bootstrappable
• Portable

Built with LLVM

Chimera uses LLVM and Clang as its system toolchain. This is used to build all core components of the system.

There is currently no GCC in the source repository. The compiler-rt component is used as the core runtime, and libc++ is used as the standard C++ library.

No GNU

There are no GNU components in the base system, except currently GNU Make (used to build a few components) and ncurses. The rest of the userland comes mostly from FreeBSD (no busybox).

The musl libc is used as the standard C library.

Fast source package build system

Chimera has a completely new source packaging system that is not written in shell as is conventional, but rather in the Python scripting language. This reduces the build system overhead to a minimum, as well as making it introspectable and so on.

The builds are always containerized, with a minimal Chimera system being used as the build environment for every package. This system is sandboxed using bubblewrap and run completely unprivileged.

The binary packaging system used is apk-tools, originally from Alpine Linux. It was chosen because of its speed and ease of integration.

Bootstrappable

The system can build itself. You can use any musl based distribution as the initial system, as long as it has the few required components needed for the system build.

After that, Chimera uses a 3-stage bootstrap path, with stage 0 building all components needed to assemble the build container, stage 1 rebuilding itself using components from stage 0, and stage 2 rebuilding itself using components from stage 1. This is done to ensure that the final system is not influenced by the initial host system.

Portable

Chimera currently targets the ppc64le, aarch64 and x86_64 architectures. It should, however, be easily portable to any architecture supported by LLVM/Clang (and its related components like compiler-rt and libunwind) and musl.