Microsoft has announced the first publicly available experimental build of Azure Linux 4.0, prepared for running in virtual machines and containers. They promise to publish experimental builds for WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) and AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service) in the future. The Azure Linux 4 branch is presented as a universal solution optimized for the Azure platform and suitable for use in all related areas, from virtual machines and containers to nodes in a Kubernetes cluster and developer systems. Distribution-specific changes are provided under the MIT license.
Compared to Azure Linux 3.0, the new branch has been migrated from its own package base to the use of packages from the Fedora 43 distribution. It is based on the native SRPM packages from the Fedora repositories, for which a set of overlays is provided—configuration files in TOML format that allow recompiling packages with additions, optimizations, and modifications necessary for Azure Linux. The azldev toolchain, written in Go and available under the MIT license, is used to generate the resulting RPM packages based on the Fedora SRPM packages and overlays. The Azure Linux build system allows generating both classic installation environments with RPM packages and monolithic atomically updatable system images.
Azure Linux 4.0 comes with Linux kernel 6.18 featuring additional optimizations, including supply chain attack protection, ensuring a predictable support and update release cycle, implementing tools for integration with Azure cloud, and including security enhancements such as syscall filtering, disk partition encryption, repository and package verification through digital signatures, protection against symbolic link attacks, and building with options to guard against buffer overflows.
The package includes new drivers optimized for the hardware used in Azur, improved integration with the Hyper-V hypervisor, and added support for GPU and AI accelerators. The package manager tdnf has been replaced with dnf5, and SELinux support has been ensured. The involved system component versions include: glibc 2.42, OpenSSL 3.5, systemd 258, Python 3.14, RPM 6.0.
Source: opennet.ru
