Microsoft Issues First Production Release Of Its CBL-Mariner 2.0 Linux Distribution

Made public last year by Microsoft was CBL-Mariner 1.0 as its internal Linux distribution used for selective purposes from Azure to WSL. This Microsoft "Common Base Linux" distribution has worked well for their internal needs while continuing to make roughly monthly public updates to its 1.0 branch. Today CBL-Mariner 2.0 marks its first production release.

Since the end of last year Microsoft has been quietly working on CBL-Mariner 2.0 and has offered public access in a "preview" state with an ISO and its package archive. Today marks the first production release of CBL-Mariner 2.0.

CBL-Mariner 2.0 has a variety of package updates with major version bumps compared to what has been shipped in CBL-Mariner 1.0 stable. However, as of writing Microsoft has yet to put out any formal change-log / release announcement to detail all of their CBL-Mariner 2.0 changes in full. With CBL-Mariner 2.0, the Linux 5.15 LTS kernel is being used as a base.

CBL-Mariner 2.0 can be downloaded from GitHub. Both AArch64 and x86_64 architectures continue to be supported by this Microsoft Linux distribution.