Oracle has released Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 8.2, a high-performance Linux kernel for Oracle Linux, based on the Linux 6.12 LTS kernel, delivering enhancements in confidential computing, file system reliability, and memory management.
A key addition in this release is support for Intel Trust Domain Extensions, which enables confidential computing by allowing virtual machines to run in isolated, hardware-encrypted trust domains. UEK 8.2 offers both guest and hypervisor support for TDX on Oracle Linux 9 and 10. Outside Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, this feature is available as a technology preview.
The release also improves file system reliability with XFS online repair, allowing administrators to check and repair XFS file systems while they remain mounted. The xfs_scrub utility verifies metadata and performs targeted repairs without downtime.
Memory management enhancements include lightweight guard pages, which mark regions of virtual memory to trigger segmentation faults on invalid access, reducing overhead compared to traditional implementations. This lowers memory usage in systems with many processes or threads.
On top of that, UEK 8.2 introduces memory allocation profiling, which tracks allocation and deallocation activity, providing insight into memory usage patterns and helping identify leaks.
The release features updated device drivers aligned with upstream kernel development, as well as ongoing integration of bug fixes and security patches from the mainline Linux kernel. Oracle continues to monitor upstream changes and applies relevant fixes to ensure stability and security.
UEK 8.2 adopts the upstream Linux kernel versioning scheme, which may affect applications that rely on kernel version parsing. Standard Linux applications are generally unaffected.
A kernel variant with 64K memory pages is available for Arm-based systems. This configuration is limited to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Arm instances and offered as a technical preview elsewhere.
For more details, see the announcement or refer to the release notes.
Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 8.2 is available in the Oracle Linux repositories for supported releases, including Oracle Linux 9 and 10.
