Amazon Linux 2027: a preview with Linux kernel 7.1, LTO and a bet on x86-64-v3

AWS has unveiled a public preview of Amazon Linux 2027. Enough time has passed since the release of Amazon Linux 2023 for the new version to bring a solid batch of software updates, along with optimizations geared toward workloads running in the AWS cloud.

Kernel and security

By default, Amazon Linux 2027 uses Linux kernel 7.1. A significant security change is that SELinux is now turned on in enforcing mode by default. New drivers for accelerators have been added, along with a number of other improvements.

Build optimizations

A substantial share of the work went into performance. All packages are now built with the -O2 optimization level and with link-time optimization (LTO) enabled. Packages for x86-64 target the x86-64-v3 level, which means they assume the presence of AVX and AVX2 instructions. In addition, automatic vectorization was employed during the build.

Optimizations were found for ARM processors too: on AArch64 Graviton instances, Transparent Hugepages are enabled by default for malloc heap arenas.

Toolchain

Amazon Linux 2027 moves to the GCC 16.1 compiler by default, and it also ships with LLVM/Clang 22 and updated versions of Rust and Go. DNF5 serves as the package manager. The distribution is based in part on Fedora 44 and Fedora 45.

Details are available on the AWS blog and in the release notes, which gather all the technical changes. Phoronix author Michael Larabel has already promised to publish the results of his own performance benchmarks of the new version soon.

Source: Phoronix