Microsoft Azure Linux 3.0 Update Pushes Additions For Intel, AMD & Arm

Microsoft overnight released the newest version of their Azure Linux 3.0 in-house Linux distribution that is used by a variety of internal services at the company as well as external customers.

With this newest monthly update to Azure Linux 3.0 there are changes to benefit all three major CPU players. On the Intel side the In-Field Scan (IFS) support is enabled for helping to verify the quality of the server CPU silicon pre-production or as an ongoing basis. Over on the Arm side the Arm FF-A support is enabled as the Firmware Framework for Arm A-profile as one of their firmware protocol specifications. Lastly on the AMD side the x86_amd_platform_device built-in is now enabled to satisfy a customer request around dealing with some I2C clock related issues.

The Azure Linux 3.0.20241101 release also adds Fedora SBAT entries to GRUB2, enables NFTables in IPTables, drops the "noxsaves" parameter from the command line in the UKI kernel image, and updates a variety of packages due to security issues and other bugs. Their Linux 6.6 LTS kernel has been updated along with PHP, the NVIDIA driver, libcxx, cURL, GDB, and a variety of other packages.

Downloads and more details on this month's Azure Linux 3.0 changes via the Azure Linux 3.0.20241101 announcement.