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 .