Amazon has started testing the Amazon Linux 2027 (AL2027) distribution, optimized for cloud environments and supporting integration with tools and advanced features of the Amazon EC2 service. The package base is based on Fedora Linux. Builds are generated for x86_64 and ARM64 (Aarch64) architectures. Despite its primary focus on use in AWS (Amazon Web Services), the distribution is also provided in the form of a universal virtual machine image that can be run on a local system or in other cloud environments.
Among the changes compared to the previous release of Amazon Linux 2023:
- Amazon Linux 2027 incorporates components from Fedora 44 and 45, with many packages including modifications specific to Amazon Linux or are packaged separately from Fedora.
- It features a custom Linux kernel built on the 7.1 branch, including new drivers for Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) and Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) devices, as well as hardware used in Amazon EC2 infrastructure. Updates for the Linux kernel are released using live patching technology, which allows vulnerabilities to be fixed and important kernel patches to be applied without rebooting the system. Kernel module verification is included with digital signatures.
- Packages are rebuilt with the options "-O2 -ftree-vectorize" and optimizations enabled at link time (LTO) for x86-64-v3 architectures (-march=x86-64-v3, utilizing AVX and AVX2 instructions) and ARM 8.2 (-march=armv8.2-a+crypto -mtune=neoverse-n1).
- System components have been updated, including GCC 16.1, Clang/LLVM 22, OpenSSH 9.9p1, OpenSSL 3.5, glibc 2.44, binutils 2.46, systemd 260, and Python 3.14.
- The default package manager is RPM 6.0 and the toolset DNF5, with its core package management functionality extracted into a separate library libdnf5, replacing PackageKit bindings with DNF Daemon, and the components previously written in Python have been rewritten in C++.
- Backports with optimized versions of system components for Graviton ARM processors have been prepared.
- Amazon Corretto is used as the Java implementation.
- The SELinux mandatory access control system is set to "enforcing" mode by default (the previous version was "permissive").
- Support for post-quantum cryptographic algorithms ML-DSA and SLH-DSA is enabled by default in OpenSSH, OpenSSL, GnuTLS, and NSS.
- The coreutils, elinks, haproxy, httpd, libmemcached-awesome, libpq, nginx-awslc, python3-awscrt, python-cryptography, python3.14, rsync, socat, tpm2-tools, tpm2-tss, trousers, and wget1 packages are compiled with the AWS-LC cryptographic library instead of OpenSSL.
- Systemd-networkd is used to manage network settings.
Source: opennet.ru
