CBL-Mariner (in which CBL stands for Common Base Linux) is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

Linux distribution A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...

that

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

has developed. It is the base

container A container is any receptacle or enclosure for holding a product used in storage, packaging, and transportation, including shipping. Things kept inside of a container are protected on several sides by being inside of its structure. The term ...

OS for

Microsoft Azure Microsoft Azure, often referred to as Azure ( , ), is a cloud computing platform operated by Microsoft for application management via around the world-distributed data centers. Microsoft Azure has multiple capabilities such as software as a ...

services and the graphical component of

WSL 2 WSL may refer to: Computing * Wide-spectrum language, a kind of programming language * Windows Subsystem for Linux, a part of Microsoft Windows 10 and Windows 11 which allows the installation of Linux distributions. Organisations * Swiss Feder ...

Overview

CBL-Mariner is being developed by the ''Linux Systems Group'' at Microsoft for its edge network services and as part of its

cloud infrastructure Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mul ...

. The company uses it as the base Linux for containers in the Azure Stack HCI implementation of Azure

Kubernetes Kubernetes (, commonly stylized as K8s) is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Google originally designed Kubernetes, but the Cloud Native Computing Foundation now maintains ...

Service. Microsoft also uses CBL-Mariner in Azure IoT Edge to run Linux workloads on

Windows IoT Windows IoT, formerly Windows Embedded, is a family of operating systems from Microsoft designed for use in embedded systems. Microsoft currently has three different subfamilies of operating systems for embedded devices targeting a wide market, ...

, and as a backend distro to host the

Weston Weston may refer to: Places Australia * Weston, Australian Capital Territory, a suburb of Canberra * Weston, New South Wales * Weston Creek, a residential district of Canberra * Weston Park, Canberra, a park Canada * Weston, Nova Scotia * W ...

compositor for WSLg. In a similar approach to

Fedora CoreOS Fedora Linux is a Linux distribution developed by the Fedora Project. Fedora contains software distributed under various free and open-source licenses and aims to be on the leading edge of open-source technologies. Fedora is the upstream sou ...

, CBL-Mariner only has the basic packages needed to support and run containers. Common Linux tools are used to add packages and manage

security update A patch is a set of changes to a computer program or its supporting data designed to update, fix, or improve it. This includes fixing security vulnerabilities and other bugs, with such patches usually being called bugfixes or bug fixes. Patches ...

s. Updates are offered either as

RPM Revolutions per minute (abbreviated rpm, RPM, rev/min, r/min, or with the notation min−1) is a unit of rotational speed or rotational frequency for rotating machines. Standards ISO 80000-3:2019 defines a unit of rotation as the dimensionl ...

packages Package may refer to: Containers or Enclosures * Packaging and labeling, enclosing or protecting products * Mail, items larger than a letter * Chip package or chip carrier * Electronic packaging, in electrical engineering * Automotive package, ...

or as complete

disk images A disk image, in computing, is a computer file containing the contents and structure of a disk volume (computing), volume or of an entire data storage device, such as a hard disk drive, tape drive, floppy disk, optical disc, or USB flash drive. ...

that can be deployed as needed. Using RPM allows adding custom packages to a base CBL-Mariner image to support additional features and services as needed. Notable features include an

iptables iptables is a user-space utility program that allows a system administrator to configure the IP packet filter rules of the Linux kernel firewall, implemented as different Netfilter modules. The filters are organized in different tables, which ...

-based

firewall Firewall may refer to: * Firewall (computing), a technological barrier designed to prevent unauthorized or unwanted communications between computer networks or hosts * Firewall (construction), a barrier inside a building, designed to limit the spre ...

, support for signed updates, and a hardened

kernel Kernel may refer to: Computing * Kernel (operating system), the central component of most operating systems * Kernel (image processing), a matrix used for image convolution * Compute kernel, in GPGPU programming * Kernel method, in machine learnin ...

. Microsoft released the operating system in 2020. Its

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is available on GitHub, mainly under the

MIT License The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, high license comp ...

, with some components under Photon License, Apache License v2,

GPLv2 The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general us ...

, and

LGPLv2.1 The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

. Building CBL-Mariner requires the Go

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

QEMU QEMU is a free and open-source emulator (Quick EMUlator). It emulates the machine's processor through dynamic binary translation and provides a set of different hardware and device models for the machine, enabling it to run a variety of guest ...

utilities, and

References

External links

* Linux distributions Enterprise Linux distributions Linux containerization Computing platforms Free and open-source software Microsoft free software Microsoft operating systems Software using the MIT license Software using the GPL license 2020 software {{Operating-system-stub

Overview

See also

References

Further reading

External links