Supported Platforms

Officially supported platforms

We support the following Linux x86-64 distributions:

• Ubuntu 20.04, 22.04, 24.04
• Debian 10, 11, and 12
• Fedora 40

We do not provide official support for other platforms. This means that we do not ensure that Shadow successfully builds and passes tests on other platforms. However, we will review pull requests that allow Shadow to build and run on unsupported platforms.

Our policy regarding supported platforms can be found in our "stability guarantees".

Supported Linux kernel versions

Some Linux distributions support multiple kernel versions, for example an older General Availability (GA) kernel and newer hardware-enablement (HWE) kernels. We try to allow Shadow to run on the oldest kernel supported on each distribution (the GA kernel). However:

• On Debian 10 (buster) We do not support the GA kernel. We do support the HWE kernel (e.g. installed via backports).
• We are currently only able to regularly test on the latest Ubuntu kernel, since that's what GitHub Actions provides.

By these criteria, Shadow's oldest supported kernel version is currently 5.4 (the GA kernel in Ubuntu 20.04.0).

Docker

If you are installing Shadow within a Docker container, you must increase the size of the container's /dev/shm mount and disable the seccomp security profile. You can do this by passing additional flags to docker run.

Example:

docker run -it --shm-size=1024g --security-opt seccomp=unconfined ubuntu:24.04

If you are having difficulty installing Shadow on any supported platforms, you may find the continuous integration build steps helpful.