Microsoft refreshes its own in-house Linux distro

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CBL-Mariner Linux distro gets a boost, but not a new version number

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CBL-Mariner, Microsoft’s Linux distro, has received its first update in more than half a year, and although it doesn’t add much on the functionality side, it does fix quite a few bugs as well as patching a number of security flaws.

The March 2022 Update, added to GitHub recently, addresses some 30 CVEs, including the dreaded Dirty Pipe vulnerability that hit headlines earlier this month. 

However there isn't much to see in terms of functionality, and the distro’s version number hasn’t moved past 1.0. 

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It does, however, come as an ISO file now, making installation a lot less troublesome. The ISO can be found on this link. It weighs 720MB and, according to The Register, installs in roughly a minute.

The publication also said it is not one of the supported options in Windows Services for Linux, which is a bit strange, but users can still enable Hyper-V and install it like that. 

First released in 2020, Common Base Linux (CBL) Mariner, is a free, open-source Linux distribution, developed by Microsoft and is the base container OS for Microsoft Azure services, as well as the graphical component of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL 2).

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The distro is being developed for Microsoft’s edge network services, as part of the company’s cloud infrastructure. Linux Systems Group, tasked with working on CBL-Mariner, uses it as the base Linux for containers in the Azure Stack HCI implementation of Azure Kubernetes Service.

CBL-Mariner is also used in Azure IoT Edge, running Linux workloads on Windows IoT, as well as to host the Weston compositor for WSLg.

Super minimal distros, which focus almost exclusively on hosting containers, is no novelty, and has been becoming increasingly popular lately, the Register notices. Intel has a similar solution, called Intel Clear Linux, which is now a standalone Linux distribution.

Via: The Register

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Sead Fadilpašić

Sead is a seasoned freelance journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes about IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, data breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning more than a decade, he’s written for numerous media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He’s also held several modules on content writing for Represent Communications.