Garden Linux

Garden Linux is a Debian GNU/Linux derivate that aims to provide small, auditable Linux images for most cloud providers (e.g. AWS, Azure, GCP etc.) and bare-metal machines. Garden Linux is the best Linux for Gardener nodes. Garden Linux provides great possibilities for customizing that is made by a highly customizable feature set to fit your needs.

!! Important !!

Starting with the major version 2017 the versioning scheme has been changed to a semver compliant one comprised of a 3 numerical segment identifier (major.minor.patch). The "old" 2017.0 is now 2017.0.0

Features

• Easy to use build system
• Repeatable and auditable builds
• Small footprint
• Purely systemd based (network, fstab etc.)
• Initramfs is dracut generated
• Running latest LTS Kernel
• MIT license
• Security
  • Fully immutable image(s) (optional)
  • OpenSSL 3.5 (default)
  • CIS Framework (optional)
• Testing
  • Unit tests (Created image testing)
  • Platform tests (Image platform tests in all supported platforms)
  • License violations (Testing for any license violations)
  • Outdated software versions (Testing for outdated software)
• Supporting major platforms out-of-the-box
  • Major cloud providers AWS, Azure, Google, Alicloud
  • Major virtualizer VMware, OpenStack, KVM
  • Bare-metal systems

Build

The build system utilises the gardenlinux/builder to create customized Linux distributions. gardenlinux/gardenlinux is maintained by the Garden Linux team, highlighting specialized "features" available for other projects.

[!TIP] For further information about the build process, and how to set it up on your machine, refer to the Build Image documentation page.

[!WARNING] Be sure to provide enough memory (at least 8GiB) to your container runtime or the VM that hosts your container runtime (in Podman or Docker Desktop). Otherwise your build may fail silently.

To initiate a build, use the command:

./build ${platform}-${feature1}-${feature2}-${feature3}-${arch}

Where:

• ${platform} denotes the desired platform (e.g., kvm, metal, aws). It should be the first part of the flavor that is built.
• ${featureX} represents one or more specific features from the features/ folder. Features are appended and seperated by a hyphen - or (if the feature starts with an underscore _) by an underscore.
• ${arch} optinally you can reference a certain architecture amd64 or arm64. It should be the last part of the flavor that is built.

You can combine multiple platforms and features as needed.

Examples:

./build kvm-python_dev
./build aws-gardener_prod-amd64

The build script fetches the required builder container and manages all internal build steps. By default, it uses rootless podman, but you can switch to another container engine with the --container-engine flag.

Garden Linux images can be built with the trustedboot feature—an extension to secureboot—for enhanced system integrity; see the trustedboot documentation for build instructions.

Test

To run unit tests for a specific target, use the command ./test-ng ${target}. Further documentation about tests is located in tests-ng/README.md.

Releases

For more information about the release strategy and lifecycle, have a look at the Release Plan Overview. List of releases is available in the Public Roadmap, Theme:"Release Plan".

Download Garden Linux Releases

Images are published as:

• GitHub Releses in https://github.com/gardenlinux/gardenlinux/releases
• GitHub Packages https://github.com/gardenlinux/gardenlinux/pkgs/container/gardenlinux

Download Nightly Releases

Nightly releases can be downloaded from the same sources and are either tagged or named nightly.

[!WARNING]
Nightly releases do not include maintenance commitments and never receive updates. Advanced users are invited to try them out and provide feedback, but it is strongly discouraged to use them in any sort of production environment.

Nvidia Driver Support

An installer can be found in the gardenlinux/gardenlinux-nvidia-installer repository.

Run Garden Linux Virtual Machines Locally Using Lima (Linux Machines)

You can run Garden Linux virtual machines on your laptop easily using Lima (Linux Machines). This can be useful if you want to evaluate Garden Linux but don't have access to Cloud accounts.

To get started, follow the lima install instructions for your OS and create a Garden Linux vm using this command:

podman run --rm ghcr.io/gardenlinux/gardenlinux/lima:latest | limactl start --name gardenlinux -

For advanced use cases, read the documentation page on Lima.

Documentation

Please refer to docs/README.md.

Contributing

Contributions to the Garden Linux open source projects are welcome. More information are available in in CONTRIBUTING.md and our docs/.

Community

If you need further assistance, have any issues or just want to get in touch with other Garden Linux users feel free to join our public chat room on Gitter.

Link: https://gitter.im/gardenlinux/community

Licensing

Copyright 2025 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company and GardenLinux contributors. Please see our LICENSE for copyright and license information. Detailed information including third-party components and their licensing/copyright information is available via the REUSE tool.