It is a book.

You can build LFS on any system that meets the requirements[1].

> Does it support SATA and UEFI boot disks yet?

The Linux kernel supports SATA disks since forever. UEFI is also supported by most bootloaders. The distro you build by following LFS will define support for things like UEFI.

I think you're confusing LFS with maybe a livecd image they used to put out?

[1] http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable/chapter02/ho...

In the context of a Linux distribution, there's a fair bit more to supporting UEFI than the BL supporting it.

At a minimum, disk layouts are drastically different in UEFI and BIOS.

LFS is so woefully out of date that it isn't even funny.

from the book: "If your host hardware is using UEFI, then the 'make defconfig' above should automatically add in some EFI-related kernel options."

The book refers to a separate text document for more info on UEFI, including the requirement of an EFI partition on a GPT formatted disk. Dated 2017. (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/hints/downloads/files/lfs-ue...)

LFS current stable comes from February 2017. The current version rc1 was released today. It's hardly dead, archaic styling aside. (Anyone else remember when books on specific software suites were relevant...?)

The links they give are to upstream. Some are already HTTPS, some redirect from HTTP. I found one case where upstream provides both HTTP and HTTPS and they link to HTTP. They should fix that.

They also provide md5sums of the tarballs, which get checked automatically in their automated build. They should switch to sha256, but there at least exists an integrity check.

I agree it's much more an educational project than a production one. But that would be true regardless; any system you're putting together by hand like this shouldn't be one that's going into production anywhere.

So sad to see something described as 'archaic styling' just because it's not 'flat design' garbage.

> Some of the provided tarballs are riddled with old vulnerabilities

Are you sure you're referencing the current stable version of the LFS book (8.0)? As noted elsewhere in this thread, there was a Live CD version of LFS which hasn't been maintained for several years, but the main book project, along with the ancillary BLFS (Beyond LFS) and ALFS (Automated LFS) are very much alive and well. LFS 8.0 gives you glibc 2.25, gcc 6.3.0, and a 4.9 kernel. If you want bleeding edge, the development version of the book is updated when upstream source packages are released.

> Does it support SATA and UEFI boot disks yet?

LFS has supported SATA ever since it was available in the kernel! There's also nothing preventing you from building a UEFI capable LFS install, provided you setup the BIOS and grub properly.

> should not be used for building a secure, general purpose system.

Why not? LFS is more than capable of providing secure, general purpose systems -- desktop and server.

beside that, LFS on its own was weirdly useless to understand linux. More like linux toolchain / sed tutorial. I made a bootable LFS twice but it was strangely broken. BLFS is where linux knowledge is IMO.

I guess it depends where you want the knowledge. When LFS first got started (and a few years before), I found at that time as a home-user, I often had to build the kernel myself (maybe I was trying too hard to be cutting edge), know more about booting (LILO and GRUB), and on occasion I messed up bootable partitions. Recently, I was trying to build a custom version of GCC and dependencies and found LFS docs helpful.

From looking over the BLFS now, I haven't had a lot of use-cases for building more userland-ish things. I've tried to avoid compiling X or Display Managers and stick to package managers if I wanted to try a new Desktop Environment. I've found Arch docs (or man pages) really helpful in configuring these kinds of things when I do need it. I can see this being more useful if I wanted to be more of a sysadmin. I remember trying to customize PAM and setup Kerberos years ago and feeling like there wasn't much help putting this all together or troubleshooting (it may have been prior to BLFS).

When you said "weirdly useless to understand linux" do you mean the linux kernel in the literal sense? Or the low level system stuff of how things are put together?

I meant the whole linux system, not the kernel. I guess I'm wrong since it's not gnu/linux from scratch. But the two are entangled.