**NOTE**: Bad English, expect mistakes

I've been Alpine desktop user for about a year now, starting from 3.21. Today's been a rough day, so I decided to do something interesting and share my experience a bit. What could possibly go wrong with updating full-blown amd64 desktop system from 3.21 to edge (3.23 alpha)? Let's see

# Upgrading apk(8)

I was following instructions from Alpine wiki [here](https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Upgrading_Alpine_Linux_to_a_new_release_branch). At the very start, `apk-tools` package didn't want to upgrade because of `libapk`'s old version, so I upgraded that first

    # apk add --upgrade libapk
    # apk add --upgrade apk-tools

# Upgrading the system

Next step is to upgrade all of the packages. `apk(8)` can do this for us. I have lots of packages in my system, so conflicts and other sorts of errors probably may occur during this process. Fortunately, `apk-fix(8)` provides user-friendly solution to easily overcome majority of them

    # apk upgrade --available
    # apk fix
    # sync; reboot

# Missing GLX extension

Now the interesting part. I was very surprised that my system booted, mounted root (I use btrfs, which is not as widely used as e.g. ext4 or xfs) and even started Xorg. I ran out of luck pretty quickly though. In no time I've noticed that windows no longer have rounded corners. The problem must be with `picom(1)`, compton fork which I use as compositor

    $ picom 
    [ 07/04/25 16:55:19.451 c2_parse_target WARN ] Type specifier is deprecated. Type "c" specified on target "_GTK_FRAME_EXTENTS" will be ignored, you can remove it.
    [ 07/04/25 16:55:19.481 glx_init ERROR ] No GLX extension.
    Assertion failed: 0 && "Couldn't find current GLX or EGL context.\n" (../src/dispatch_common.c: epoxy_get_proc_address: 872)
    [1]    1343 abort      picom

Ouch... it seems that some drivers are gone. After investigating `/var/log/Xorg.0.log`, I've noticed some interesting lines regarding GLX faults:

    [  6235.055] (EE) AIGLX error: dlopen of /usr/lib/dri/iris_dri.so failed (Error loading shared library /usr/lib/dri/iris_dri.so: No such file or directory)
    [  6235.055] (EE) AIGLX error: unable to load driver iris
    [  6235.055] (EE) AIGLX error: dlopen of /usr/lib/dri/swrast_dri.so failed (Error loading shared library /usr/lib/dri/swrast_dri.so: No such file or directory)
    [  6235.055] (EE) AIGLX error: unable to load driver swrast
    [  6235.055] (EE) GLX: could not load software renderer

Problem appears to be related to kernel module `iris_dri.so`, which is responsible for GLX extension and is (for whatever reason) now missing from my installation. Even though file is in fact provided via [mesa-dri-gallium](https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/package/edge/main/x86_64/mesa-dri-gallium), Xorg searches for it in different location now. Quick soft link fixed the issue though

    # ln -fs /usr/lib/xorg/modules/dri/iris_dri.so /usr/lib/dri/iris_dri.so
    # kill -9 `pgrep Xorg` # restart X window system

# Urxvt(1) SIGSEGV

    $ urxvt
    Perl API version v5.XX.X of urxvt does not match v5.XX.X at -e line 1.
    BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at -e line 1.
    urxvt: unable to initialize perl-interpreter, continuing without.
    [1]    9767 segmentation fault (core dumped)  urxvt

Well, not quite. `gdb(1)` shows that root cause of segfault is actually `libperl`. Answer on this [thread](https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=160686) suggests to see if problem is related to `.X{resources,defaults}` misconfiguration. Urxvt works like a charm without these, but even single one perfectly correct line in `.Xdefaults` causes it to fail. I'd tried to downgrade perl via installing it from 3.21 mirror, but that didn't solve an issue

So I've manually downloaded `rxvt-unicode-9.31.tar.bz2` from vendor's website, configured it with:

    ./configure \
      --enable-everything \
      --prefix=/usr/local \
      CC=gcc CFLAGS='-ggdb' CXXFLAGS='-ggdb'

and built it myself. Added debugging symbols as well, just in case stuff is still broken. After a while I got it working with my current `.X*` files and that's awesome. No patches, no code modification, urxvt runs as is. I stripped debugging symbols from installed executables once they are not needed anymore

# Other stuff

Nothing else is broken after upgrade, believe it or not. `alsa`, `pulseaudio`, `wine`, small and huge X-based apps. The only thing I did is downgraded GIMP to 2.0 because I'm too lazy to move my configuration, layout and themes over to 3.0 for now. Ghidra (RE-framework) needs some extra configuration work, but that's about it

    $ cat /etc/alpine-release
    3.23.0_alpha20250612

# Afterword

After all, it's Linux — of course things **will** **break**, we should **expect** things to unpredictably **break**. But it could be much-much worse than that, it was pretty smooth experience to be honest. A bit of tweaking, a bit of work here and there, eventually stuff works like a charm

The more I use Alpine, the more I appreciate the work of maintainers. Man, upgrading over 2k packages with only two small problems is... something

I upgraded ~2k packages with only 2 problems (writeup)