Canonical and Microsoft Create Azure-Focused Kernel for Ubuntu Cloud Images

Canonical and Microsoft have teamed up to develop an Azure-focused Ubuntu kernel. They are announcing that the new, smaller kernel will be included by default in Ubuntu 16.04’s Cloud Images starting this week.

The organizations say the kernel will receive the same support and security updates as regular Ubuntu kernels. Currently, the Azure-focused kernel has yet to do without Canonical’s Livepatch service, which allows critical patches to be applied without a reboot. This service may be available in the future, according to the announcement.

Among other things, the new minified kernel should perform better under intensive workloads on certain Azure instances. In addition, there is support for Accelerated Networking, with which a better network performance can be achieved. Furthermore, the most recent Hyper-V drivers are present.

Users can verify that they are using the new kernel by running uname -r and checking the output for the word Azure. It is also possible to revert to the old version by installing and restarting it. Collaboration between Canonical and Microsoft is more common, for example when Bash was introduced in Windows 10 in 2016.