Microsoft News Archives

As another interesting takeaway from this week's Microsoft Build 2026 conference beyond their open-source Intelligent Terminal project is Coreutils for Windows. Microsoft is maintaining a fork of Rust Coreutils for Windows to ease the developer experience across Windows / WSL / macOS / Linux.

Back in 2024 there were Linux patches to enable a partially-working Microsoft Surface Pro 9 5G laptop that is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8xc Gen 3 (SC8280XP) SoC. Now in 2026, there are new patches for making that ARM-powered Microsoft Surface laptop actually working more respectably under Linux... Like a working display and more.

Microsoft released Azure Linux 3.0.20260506 on Saturday in order to ship the latest security fixes affecting a wide variety of open-source software projects.

For those making use of the WireGuard open-source, secure VPN tunnel software, WireGuard For Windows 1.0 is finally available.

Microsoft on Friday released linux-msft-wsl-6.18.20.1 as the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) kernel updated against the Linux 6.18 LTS series.

Microsoft today announced their newest open-source (MIT-licensed) software project.. the Agent Governance Toolkit. Microsoft is trying their hand at coming up with runtime security governance for autonomous AI agents.

Well, here's an unexpected surprise... A new version of the Linux kernel patches for DXGKRNL were posted today for that DirectX kernel driver that began a few years ago for supporting Windows Subsystem For Linux (WSL) use-cases. This comes four years to the month after the prior version was posted and without much excitement for getting it into the mainline Linux kernel.

Microsoft on Tuesday released Azure Linux 3.0.20260304 as the newest monhtly update to their in-house Linux platform.

Microsoft has published a new version of its open-source DirectX Shader Compiler. Besides adding Shader Model 6.9 production support, making this DX Compiler update interesting to us are the SPIR-V back-end improvements and enhancing interoperability with Vulkan drivers.

For those dealing with Microsoft Hyper-V for virtualization, the Linux 7.0 mainline kernel has seen a number of improvements there. This work follows KVM also bringing some nice improvements in Linux 7.0.

A pull request for the Microsoft .NET Runtime build on Linux to use IO_uring for sockets is showing some massive performance benefits.

Microsoft overnight released Azure Linux 3.0.20260204 as the latest release of their in-house Linux distribution widely used within their Azure environment and elsewhere.

With QEMU 10.2 that released at the end of last year is the new "MSHV" accelerator for allowing VMs to be created from a Microsoft Hyper-V guest without using nested virtualization. Last weekend at FOSDEM 2026 was a presentation on this MSHV accelerator for those interested.

Microsoft engineers and other stakeholders have been developing LiteBox as a security-focused library OS written in the Rust programming language and leveraging Linux Virtualization Based Security "LVBS". The design is for LiteBox to operate as a secure kernel protecting the normal guest kernel via virtualization hardware.

Microsoft in Windows 11 22H2 introduced a new ACPI Device Specific Method (DSM) "Turn On Display" notification that the Linux 7.0 kernel will be adding support for in dealing with some otherwise problematic laptop behavior.

Microsoft posted a patch series for introducing Hyper-V integrated scheduler support into the Linux kernel for enhancing vCPU scheduling behavior for virtual machines running within Microsoft's virtualized environment.

Microsoft on Monday released Azure Linux 3.0.20251206 as the newest monthly update to its in-house Linux distribution used within the Azure cloud and elsewhere at the Windows company.

Microsoft today released WSL 2.7.0, the newest version of their Windows Subsystem for Linux code that enables running Linux binaries atop Windows 11 hosts.

Earlier in the year Microsoft proposed the "Hornet" Linux security module to provide signature verification capabilities for eBPF programs to provide for better system security. It's been months since hearing anything more about it and not being merged, but yesterday they "reintroduced" it to the Linux kernel community.

For benefiting their Azure cloud and other users of Hyper-V virtualization at large, Microsoft has rolled out a number of feature additions and improvements for their Hyper-V kernel code in Linux 6.19.

The Non-Volatile Memory Device (NVDIMM) subsystem updates were merged today for the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel. Most notable this cycle for the NVDIMM code is a new open-source driver addition courtesy of Microsoft.

Microsoft announced the Cobalt 200 processor as their next-generation cloud-native CPU for the Azure Cloud. The Cobalt 200 will feature 132 Arm Neoverse-V3 based cores.

A few weeks back I reported on Linux kernel patches surfacing for implementing Microsoft's ACPI Fan Extensions. This should help some HP devices and hardware from other OEMs for obtaining fan information reporting under Linux. The good news now is that the patches should be part of the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle.

Microsoft today released Azure Linux 3.0.20251021 as the latest update to their in-house Linux distribution.

Patches were posted this week for implementing Microsoft's extensions around the ACPI fan device for allowing the operating system to set fan speed trip points. In turn this should help some HP systems and likely other OEMs too in getting fan information working under Linux.

Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization support within the Linux kernel continues to be steadily enhanced and it's inched along further for Linux 6.18.

Microsoft released Azure Linux 3.0.20250910 as the newest version of this in-house Linux distribution used by Azure and other services. Azure Linux 3.0 has long been using the Linux 6.6 LTS kernel while now Linux 6.12 LTS is a new option focused on providing better hardware enablement support.

A new feature Microsoft has been working on for its Azure Linux operating system is OS Guard as a container-host platform that enforces immutability, code integrity, mandatory access control, and other features. Microsoft quietly revealed more about OS Guard last month and yesterday's release of Azure Linux 3.0.20250822 builds out more of the OS Guard functionality.

Last week Microsoft released new versions of WSL2 for a yet-to-be-public security vulnerability affecting their Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 implementation. Those details around CVE-2025-53788 are now public for this vulnerability that could lead to elevation of privileges.

Microsoft today released an updated version of Windows Subsystem for Linux "WSL" that allows running Linux binaries atop Windows 11. There is only one change noted and it's for a yet-to-be-public security vulnerability.

Microsoft formally announced today its newest open-source project: Wassette. The Wassette is MIT-licensed and includes Linux and macOS support alongside Windows while being a Rust+WebAssembly-based project focused on securing AI agents.

Posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list are a set of nine patches for bringing up support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite/Plus powered Microsoft Surface Pro 11 2-in-1 laptop.

Microsoft released Azure Linux 3.0.20250702 on Tuesday as the newest monthly update to this in-house Linux distribution used throughout the company and by external parties.

Microsoft announced back in May at their Build developer conference that WSL would be going open-source. Today Windows Subsystem for Linux 2.6 was released as their first new release now being an open-source project.

Microsoft on Tuesday released a new version of Azure Linux, their in-house Linux distribution that is used for a variety of purposes from the Azure cloud to powering other Microsoft services.

Microsoft's open-source code contributions to the Mesa 3D graphics stack continues... Hitting Mesa 25.2-devel today was a patch adding 61,925 lines of code patch as they introduce a new Gallium3D front-end.

Microsoft kicked off its Build 2025 developer conference today with some open-source announcements.

Microsoft announced today that Fedora Linux is now treated as an official distribution within their Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) confines.

Yesterday brought the newest update to Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution, Azure Linux. The Azure Linux 3.0.20250402 brought many package updates mostly in the name of shipping security fixes plus brought new instructions on making use of the AMD graphics driver stack under this Microsoft Linux distribution along with various other updates.

Microsoft last year announced the open-source Hyperlight project as an embedded VMM for use as a micro-VM manager of sorts that can be run within Windows and Linux applications. This VM-based security for small embedded functions now has its scope expanded with the open-source release today of Hyperlight Wasm for bringing in WebAssembly to the party.

With the Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization updates for the Linux 6.15 kernel there are two new features worth mentioning.

Microsoft's newest open-source contribution to the Linux kernel being proposed is... Hornet, a Linux security module (LSM) for providing signature verification of eBPF programs.

Microsoft is out today with their newest monthly update to their in-house Linux distribution, Azure Linux, with all available package and security updates through this month's Patch Tuesday.

Back in 2017 was the initial open-source DirectX Shader Compiler milestone and since then Microsoft has continued iterating on it with better Linux support, new features, and ironing out other gaps in this "DirectXShaderCompiler" project. On Friday they released the newest version of this DirectX Shader Compiler that features another newly open-sourced component.

Microsoft engineers released Azure Linux 3.0.20250206 overnight as the newest monthly update to this in-house Microsoft Linux distribution that is used within their Azure cloud infrastructure and a variety of other purposes at the Redmond company.

In a blog post dated for this past Thursday but only being made public on Sunday night, Microsoft issued an announcement open-sourcing their new NoSQL database... Where it gets weirder is that it's named DocumentDB. Amazon also has a database offering named DocumentDB albeit proprietary.

Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution known as Azure Linux is out with its 3.0.20250102 update today. One of the interesting changes in this release is adding new AMD driver package repositories for allowing Azure Linux users to fetch the latest official AMDGPU driver packages or alternatively the newest "preview" driver packages.

This year was another interesting year for Microsoft with continuing to make more of their software projects open-source, adding more Unix/Linux-like features to Windows, continuing to advance Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), keeping up with maintenance on their Azure Linux distribution, and other unexpected open-source/Linux surprises.

Looking for a 2025 New Year's resolution? The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is encouraging a pressure campaign on Microsoft to continue.

Microsoft engineers rounded out their work week by releasing Azure Linux 3.0.20241203 on Friday evening as the newest monthly installment for their in-house Linux distribution.