Amazon Linux 2022 Released - Based On Fedora With Changes

Amazon Web Services has made Amazon Linux 2022 now publicly available in preview form as the newest version of their Linux distribution.

Amazon Linux / Amazon Linux 2 had been based on a combination of RHEL and Fedora packages while in today's Amazon Linux 2022 release they note it's explicitly based on Fedora. Besides apparently being more Fedora oriented now than RHEL, with Amazon Linux 2022 they are transitioning to a formal two year release cadence between their releases while having quarterly point releases.

AWS intends to provide major Amazon Linux updates every two years while each major release will see five years of support and quarterly minor release updates.

As for the noted changes in Amazon Linux 2022, "AL2022 uses the Fedora project as its upstream to provide customers with a wide variety of the latest software, such as updated language runtimes, as part of quarterly releases. In addition, AL2022 has SELinux enabled and enforced by default." There are surely more changes in tow while this is just what they outlined for today's announcement.

The Amazon Linux 2022 preview is available in all commercial regions and comes with no additional cloud charges. I'll be running some Amazon Linux 2022 cloud benchmarks shortly on Phoronix relative to other OS types in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

The brief AL2022 announcement can be read on aws.amazon.com.

Update: More features of Amazon Linux 2022 are listed via this GitHub repo. Besides the usual optimizations and security work, some other items noted include kernel live patching, extra kernel hardening, and more. Amazon Linux 2022 is making use of the Linux 5.15 LTS kernel.