Microsoft Continues Improving Its Internal Linux Distro With Another Update

It was just over a year ago Microsoft lifted the lid further on CBL-Mariner as its internal Linux distribution used for a variety of purposes at the company from running within their Azure cloud environment to also finding use by WSL, and various other use-cases. They have continued issuing updates and expanding the capabilities of this enterprise-tasked Linux distribution.

Microsoft has kept up with issuing one or more CBL-Mariner updates per month. This summer they rolled out CBL-Mariner 2.0 with many changes over its former 1.0 state, which continues to be maintained too. CBL-Mariner relies upon RPM SPEC files and other assets from Fedora, Photon OS, Openmamba, and Linux From Scratch. This week marked the release of CBL-Mariner 2.0 July 2022 Update 2.

CBL-Mariner 2.0 July 2022 Update 2 brings more packages that are useful when running on bare metal hardware like turbostat and cpupower. They have also added other useful packages like FIO and sysbench for performance testing, Kubevirt, libexif, kernel-tools, and others.

This newest revision to CBL-Mariner 2.0 also adds the ability to build quicker by packing a subset of RPMs, network configuration support for unattended ISO installs, moving to a newer Linux 5.15 LTS point release, and a variety of other updates. As is common these days among all Linux distributions, each new release also brings a number of CVE security fixes.

Downloads and more details on Microsoft's CBL-Mariner 2.0 July 2022 Update 2 revision via GitHub. ISOs for CBL-Mariner can be found via the README page.