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Base Flavors

The base-* tier provides a zero-bloat, hardened Linux foundation for general-purpose virtual machines, bare-metal servers, and cloud instances.

Key Characteristics

  • Distro Base: Ubuntu 26.04 LTS (Resolute).
  • Purged Components: snapd, lxd, Ubuntu Pro client, telemetry daemons, motd news, unused locales, and man pages.
  • Time Synchronization: Network Time Security (NTS) chrony client with multi-tier Anycast (Cloudflare) and national metrology institutes (PTB, Netnod, SIDN, 3eck).
  • Hypervisor Coexistence: Both qemu-guest-agent and open-vm-tools are installed; each daemon remains dormant unless booted on its matching hypervisor.
  • Portability: Cloud-init operates with unrestricted datasources for seamless compatibility with Proxmox, Unraid, VMware, AWS, GCP, and Bare-Metal.
  • Kernel Tuning: Controlled via KERNEL_PROFILE (generic, baremetal, k8s, ai-infer). Injects optimal sysctls, cgroups v2 accounting, and GRUB cmdline arguments.

Available Flavors

base-generic

Lightweight headless compute image. Suitable for web servers, databases, and microVMs. Uses KERNEL_PROFILE=generic.

base-intel

Includes Intel Media Driver (iHD), Level Zero runtime (libze), OpenCL compute, Battlemage Xe2 support, CDI specification, and diagnostics (vainfo, clinfo).

base-amd

Includes Mesa Gallium radeonsi VA-API, RADV Vulkan drivers, AMDGPU DRM runtime, and CDI specification.

base-nvidia-*

Segregated into four hardware generations and datacenter:

  • base-nvidia-legacy: NVIDIA 580 driver branch for Pascal and Volta (sm_60, sm_70).
  • base-nvidia-mainstream: NVIDIA 595 driver branch for Turing and Ampere (sm_75, sm_80, sm_86).
  • base-nvidia-bleeding: NVIDIA 615 driver branch for Blackwell (sm_100, sm_120, RTX 5090, B200).
  • base-nvidia-datacenter: NVIDIA Open Kernel Modules, Fabric Manager, and NVIDIA Enroot for Hopper and Blackwell multi-GPU NVLink meshes. Uses KERNEL_PROFILE=baremetal.