Microsoft's Azure Linux 3.0 Adds 64K Kernel Option, NFTables & Intel E800 Networking

Microsoft engineers rounded out their work week by releasing Azure Linux 3.0.20241203 on Friday evening as the newest monthly installment for their in-house Linux distribution.

Azure Linux 3.0.20241203 is the latest version of this Microsoft Linux OS used by Azure services, edge appliances, and various other purposes within the Redmond company. With this December update to Azure Linux they have have introduced a "kernel-64k" option for those wanting an AArch64 Linux kernel image built for a 64K page size. A 64K page size can help greatly with performance on ARM servers especially compared to 4K.

Azure Linux 3.0.20241203 also adds NFTables to the distribution for that firewall/filtering option. Also on the networking side is enabling the Intel Ethernet E800 wired networking driver.

Some of the other changes in this Azure Linux 3.0 update include Dracut adjustments, Lua support within fluent-bit, enabling signature verification of kexec'ed kernels, and a number of package updates to fix known security issues. Azure Linux's Image Customizer is also now able to generate PXE-bootable ISO images.

More details on these latest changes to Microsoft Azure Linux as well as to download this Microsoft Linux OS via GitHub.