Microsoft's CBL-Mariner Linux Distribution Now Ships The AMD Graphics Driver

In addition to Microsoft's Build 2023 conference this week where they announced expanded archive/compression format support, Windows Terminal improvements, more AI tech, and other initiatives, they also happened to release CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230518 as the newest version of their in-house Linux distribution.

CBL-Mariner continues to serve a variety of purposes at Microsoft from running within Azure infrastructure to also finding use within Windows Subsystem for Linux and other Microsoft applications. While it began as a server/infrastructure-focused Linux initiative, with time it's grown in scope and now includes more HPC support and adding more packages to round out the experience including for desktop use-cases.

With CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230518 it's notable in that they are now enabling the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver within their kernel-drivers-gpu package. The AMDGPU kernel driver support is vital for AMD Radeon graphics support on the desktop as well as being important for GPU compute with ROCm when paired with the AMDKFD kernel driver.

Besides now shipping the AMDGPU DRM module, the CBL-Mariner update also enables hardware monitoring and tracing configurations, kernel modules for TLS, now shipping the Intel Skylake EDAC driver, enabling various Dell device drivers, NVMe multi-path is now enabled for its kernel, and other kernel updates.

This month's CBL-Mariner update also expands on confidential computing support with new Kata Containers and Moby Containerd packages setup for CC. There is also a number of kernel security fixes, numerous bug fixes, and various package updates.

Downloads and more details on this new CBL-Mariner 2.0 update via GitHub.