Microsoft's CBL-Mariner 2.0 Linux Distro Adds DNF5, Zstd-Compressed RPMs

Microsoft has released CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230805 as the newest monthly-ish update to their in-house Linux distribution used for purposes from Azure to WSL.

This time the new update is coming just a week after the prior CBL-Mariner 2.0 revision that added Clippy and other enhancements. Arguably most notable with today's CBL-Mariner 2.0 Linux OS spin is adding the DNF5 package management solution.

While last month DNF5 wasn't deemed ready for Fedora 39 by default and now is delayed to at least Fedora 41 due to RHEL 10 branching with Fedora 40. Microsoft is shipping DNF5 alongside DNF4, similar to what can also be setup for those interested on Fedora with the two package management versions co-existing. DNF5 was added to CBL-Mariner 2.0 by one of the Microsoft engineers working on their in-house Linux distribution.

Today's CBL-Mariner 2.0 revision also adds a variety of other changes to existing packages, numerous security fixes, RPM package building is now done with Zstd compression level 7, the NVIDIA/Mellanox Bluefield 2 support is now in CBL-Mariner's kernel build configuration, Golang 1.19 is now used by the distro's tooling, and the Linux 5.15.122.1 LTS kernel is powering this distribution to provide the latest bug/security fixes.

Prior to now, CBL-Mariner RPMs were being compressed with Gzip level 9 by default. By switching to Zstd with a compression level of 7, RPM package building is now faster and the RPM file size is in the 3~15% range over the prior Gzip default. Details on the Zstd-compressed RPM default change via this pull.

Downloads and more details on today's CBL-Mariner 2.0 Linux distribution update via GitHub.