Redis/memcached are used in production on FreeBSD servers (and other BSD systems).

Probably not many in production, but the "recent kernel" is going to be the more important part.

I'm not hip to how much new stuff is backport-able, so this may preclude Ubuntu 20.04, for instance. You lose the "LTS" part if you compile your own kernel, if you manage to make it functional at all.

Note: I never use kernel modules due to the issues rhel/debian and I have had with such things in the distant past.

> I'm not hip to how much new stuff is backport-able, so this may preclude Ubuntu 20.04, for instance. You lose the "LTS" part if you compile your own kernel, if you manage to make it functional at all.

I'm not sure that concern is justified. It seems io_uring was pushed as part of the 5.1 linux kernel release, and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS seems to have been shipped with 5.4.

https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=linux-image-gene...

Also, a quick Google search pointed to io_uring patches for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

The kernel has its own LTS releases, and running Linux in the cloud is a well tested use case. Any library not available in your distro of choice can be built from source and tracked manually, which usually works well enough.