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The Void (Linux) distribution

Void is a general purpose operating system, based on the monolithic Linux kernel. Its package system allows you to quickly install, update and remove software; software is provided in binary packages or can be built directly from sources with the help of the XBPS source packages collection.

It is available for a variety of platforms. Software packages can be built natively or cross compiled through the XBPS source packages collection.

Follow us on Mastodon, visit the #voidlinux IRC channel on libera.chat, and join the Void Linux subreddit.

Visit the Void build server console for package build status updates.

Contribute to the Void Linux project by adding and updating packages and extending the documentation. More information can be found in the Handbook.

Not a fork!

Void Linux is an independent distribution, developed entirely by volunteers.

Unlike trillions of other existing distros, Void is not a modification of an existing distribution. Void's package manager and build system have been written from scratch.

Stable rolling release

Void focuses on stability, rather than on being bleeding-edge. Install once, update routinely and safely.

Thanks to our continuous build system, new software is built into binary packages as soon as the changes are pushed to the void-packages repository.

runit

We use runit as the init system and service supervisor.

runit is a simple and effective approach to initialize the system with reliable service supervision. Refer to the Void Handbook for an introduction.

C library diversity

Void Linux supports both the musl and GNU libc implementations, patching incompatible software when necessary and working with upstream developers to improve the correctness and portability of their projects.

XBPS

xbps is the native system package manager, written from scratch with a 2-clause BSD license.

XBPS allows you to quickly install/update/remove software in your system and features detection of incompatible shared libraries and dependencies while updating or removing packages (among others). Refer to the Handbook for an overview.

xbps-src

xbps-src is the xbps package builder, written from scratch with a 2-clause BSD license.

This builds the software in containers through the use of Linux namespaces, providing isolation of processes and bind mounts (among others). No root required!

Additionally, xbps-src can build natively or cross compile for the target machine, and supports multiple C libraries (glibc and musl currently).

void-packages changes

void-packages pull requests

xbps changes

Recent news

February 02, 2025

February 2025 Image Release: Arm64 Extravaganza

We’re pleased to announce that the 20250202 image set has been promoted to current and is now generally available.

You can find the new images on our downloads page and on our many mirrors.

This release introduces support for several arm64 UEFI devices:

Live ISOs for aarch64 and aarch64-musl should also support other arm64 devices that support UEFI and can run a mainline (standard) kernel.

Additionally, this image release includes:

  • Linux 6.12 in live ISOs
  • Xfce 4.20 in xfce-flavored live ISOs
  • Linux 6.6.69 in Raspberry Pi PLATFORMFSes and images
  • xgenfstab, a new script from xtools to simplify generation of /etc/fstab for chroot installs

and the following changes:

  • Fixed issue where systems with Nvidia graphics cards would not boot without nomodeset (void-packages #52545)
  • Added a bootloader menu entry to disable graphics by setting nomodeset (void-mklive 380f0fd)
  • Added additional hotkeys in the bootloader menu. See the handbook for a full listing (void-mklive 380f0fd)
  • Raspberry Pi platform images are now smaller by default, but will grow the root partition to fit the storage device upon first boot using growpart. See the handbook for more details (void-mklive #379)
  • void-installer now includes a post-installation menu to enable services on the installed system (void-mklive #389)
  • rpi-aarch64 and rpi-aarch64-musl PLATFORMFSes and platform images should now support the recently-released Raspberry Pi 500 and CM5.

You may verify the authenticity of the images by following the instructions in the handbook, and using the following minisign key information:

untrusted comment: minisign public key 4D56E70F102AF9F9
RWT5+SoQD+dWTeOdNuc4Q/jq2+3+jpql7+JJp4WukkxTdpsZlk2EGuPj

A screenshot of an xfce desktop with two windows. One is firefox showing voidlinux.org, one is a terminal showing fastfetch output, indicating that this is a Thinkpad X13s

September 29, 2024

Goodbye, Python 2! Hello, New Buildbot!

At long last, Void is saying goodbye to Python 2. Python ended support for Python 2 in 2020, but Void still had over 200 packages that depended on it. Since then, Void contributors have updated, patched, or removed these packages. For the moment, Python 2 will remain in the repositories as python2 (along with python2-setuptools and python2-pip). python is now a metapackage that will soon point to python3.

One of the biggest blockers for this project was some of Void’s own infrastructure: our buildbot, which builds all packages for delivery to users. For a long time, we were stuck on buildbot 0.8.12 (released on 21 April 2015 and using Python 2), because it was complex to get working, had many moving parts, and was fairly fragile. To update it to a modern version would require significant time and effort.

Now, we move into the future: we’ve upgraded our buildbot to version 4.0, and it is now being managed via our orchestration system, Nomad, to improve reliability, observability, and reproducibility in deployment. Check out the 2023 Infrastructure Week series of blog posts for more info about how and why Void uses Nomad.

Visit the new buildbot dashboard at build.voidlinux.org and watch your packages build!