# Linux Kernel Module Cheat

#### 38.20.4. Linux distro choice

We haven’t found the ultimate distro yet, here is a summary table of trade-offs that we care about: Table 8, “Comparison of Linux distros for usage in this repository”.

Table 8. Comparison of Linux distros for usage in this repository
Distro | Packages in single Git tree | Git tracked docs | Cross build without QEMU | Prebuilt downloads | Number of packages
--- | --- | --- | --- | --- | ---
Buildroot 2018.05 | y | y | y | n | 2k (1)
Ubuntu 18.04 | n | n | n | y | 50k (3)
Yocto 2.5 (8) | ? | y (5) | ? | y (6) | 400 (7)
Alpine Linux 3.8.0 | y | n (1) | ? | y | 2000 (4)

- (1): Wiki…​ https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Main_Page

- (2): `ls packages | wc`

- (3): https://askubuntu.com/questions/120630/how-many-packages-are-in-the-main-repository

- (4): `ls main community non-free | wc`

- (5): yes, but on a separate Git tree…​ https://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/yocto-docs/

- (6): yes, but the initial Poky build / download still took 5 hours on 38Mbps internet, and QEMU failed to boot at the end…​ https://bugzilla.yoctoproject.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12953

- (7): `ls recipes-* | wc`

- (8): Poky reference system: http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky

Other interesting possibilities that I haven’t evaluated well:

- NixOS https://nixos.org/ Seems to support full build from source well. Not much cross compilation information however.

- Gentoo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentoo_Linux Seems to support full build from source well.