Oracle Linux is a Linux distribution packaged and freely distributed by Oracle, available partially under the GNU General Public License since late 2006. It is compiled from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) source code, replacing Red Hat branding with Oracle’s.
The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) for Oracle Linux provides the latest open source innovations and business-critical performance and security optimizations for cloud and on-premise deployment. It is the Linux kernel that powers Oracle Gen 2 Cloud and Oracle Engineered Systems such as Oracle Exadata Database Machine.
Oracle Linux 7 Update 9 ships with the following kernel packages, which include bug fixes, security fixes, and enhancements:
- UEK Release 6 (kernel-uek-5.4.17-2011.6.2.el7uek) for x86-64 and aarch64
- Red Hat Compatible Kernel (RHCK) (kernel-3.10.0-1160.el7) for x86-64 only
What is new in Oracle Linux 7.9
- Enhanced support for the Arm (aarch64) platform, including improvements in the areas of security and virtualization.
- UEK R6 includes all Cgroup v2 features, along with several enhancements.
- Parallelized kswapd. This optimization improves performance by avoiding direct reclaims, which can be resource intensive and time consuming.
- Several performance enhancements have been implemented in the kernel’s memory management code to improve the efficiency of clearing pages and cache.
- Support for the OCFS2 file system is enabled.
- Support for the Btrfs file system is enabled and support to select Btrfs as a file system type when formatting devices is available.
- The FreeRDP feature for the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is updated from version 2.0.0 to version 2.1.1.
Bottom line
In addition, Oracle Linux can be downloaded, used, and distributed free of charge and all updates and errata are freely available. Customers decide which of their systems require a support subscription. This makes Oracle Linux an ideal choice for development, testing, and production systems.
