Microsoft's CBL-Mariner Linux Distribution Adds Intel SGX Support, Updated Packages

One of Microsoft's Linux/open-source surprises for 2021 was publishing of CBL-Mariner as their internal Linux distribution used for a variety of purposes at the company. Microsoft has kept to updating CBL-Mariner publicly on a monthly basis and continuing to make it easier to test out and enhance its usefulness. Last night they published their January 2022 build of Microsoft's Linux operating system.

One of the main feature changes with 1.0 CBL-Mariner January 2022 is they now allow building and installing kernel support for Intel's SGX driver. Those wishing to make use of Software Guard Extensions can now do so on CBL-Mariner. Intel SGX can be used for digital rights management, encryption, and other secure computing purposes for having private memory regions "enclaves". It took a long time for the SGX kernel patches to be upstreamed and on the CPU side is deprecated in the latest Rocket Lake / Alder Lake desktop CPUs, but still seems to have some interest from server customers and hence the interest in supporting it with CBL-Mariner.

The January 2022 update to CBL-Mariner also adds Btrfs-progs 5.16 for the latest Btrfs file-system utilities, Erlang 24.2, and a variety of other package updates. There are also many package updates for addressing security issues in the likes of Vim, the Linux kernel, Numpy, and other packages.

Rounding out this month's CBL-Mariner build is a configuration for creating a QCOW image of the OS. Downloads and more details for Microsoft CBL-Mariner on GitHub.