Microsoft Contributes Integrity Improvements To Linux 5.12

[ssokolow]

Well it is sounds like the cloud version of "secure boot", I wouldn't surprise if at a certain point you will forced to use or buy only M$ certified Linux kernels...

When they're competing with AWS and Google Cloud who'd both be happy to take their dissatisfied customers? Unlikely.

[bug77]

Well it is sounds like the cloud version of "secure boot", I wouldn't surprise if at a certain point you will forced to use or buy only M$ certified Linux kernels...

Tbh, they free to do whatever they want within Azure. Other clouds, they don't control.

[PublicNuisance]

Well nobody has said it yet so it falls to me: How can a company who has no integrity try to improve the integrity of the Linux kernel ?

[mbrf]

"Contribute"
"Integrity"
"Improvement"
All three individual words are prime examples of words I never in my wildest fever dreams, could have imagined in the same sentence as the word/name "Microsoft", yet here we are... And had it not been open source, I wouldn't ever have trusted either of those words in the same sentence as Microsoft...

...And I'm not sure I do now;
I don't really know anything about this (which I'm sure is glaringly obvious), but knowing Microsoft, this read smells ever so slightly like telemetry - or at least something that could be used to coax information out of these things under the guise of making sure that the newest kernel is loaded.


EDIT:
Just saw the above post now. Had the page loaded for a while, before responding.
We'll put, PublicNuisance! :'D

[Space Heater]

From the linked article: "- Around 50% of the VMs on Azure are Linux-based..." Those VM's hypervisor would likely but not necessarily be MS' Hyper-V.

Given Microsoft has added support for Linux to boot as the root partition for Hyper-V, I think it is likely that Microsoft is planning on (or already is) using Linux rather than Windows to manage Hyper-V in Azure. So they very well could be using these integrity features for both their own security and their customers'.

[pal666]

Well it is sounds like the cloud version of "secure boot", I wouldn't surprise if at a certain point you will forced to use or buy only M$ certified Linux kernels...

i'm pretty sure ms doesn't care what you run on azure as long as you pay per hour

[Danielsan]

i'm pretty sure ms doesn't care what you run on azure as long as you pay per hour

You're probably right but I am still having hard time to understand why you should run a Linux distro over a Windows server...

[RahulSundaram]

You're probably right but I am still having hard time to understand why you should run a Linux distro over a Windows server...

What operating system is running under the hypervisor is largely irrelevant to you in a cloud platform.

[Danielsan]

What operating system is running under the hypervisor is largely irrelevant to you in a cloud platform.

Not sure... The same reason you prefer Linux over Windows apply also on the hypervisor space.

[RahulSundaram]

Not sure... The same reason you prefer Linux over Windows apply also on the hypervisor space.

Explain how it impacts you when you are using a cloud provider.