The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 for Oracle Linux is now generally available. The updated kernel includes performance and scalability enhancements. The new release, which is based on the 3.0.16 mainline kernel, also includes improved memory and resource management, and is optimized to be deployed as a virtual guest.
"Oracle Linux continues to deliver timely Linux innovations, backed by real-world testing, providing users a modern, scalable and reliable platform for their business critical workload demands," said Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president of Linux and Virtualization Engineering, Oracle. "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 further demonstrates Oracle's investment in Linux technology and the community, and delivers on our goal to make Linux better for everyone."
With this release, the Btrfs, the next-generation file system for Linux, is now production-ready. Standard in Oracle Linux, Btrfs supports data stores of up to 16 exabytes, is optimized for solid state disks, is easy to administer, and includes built-in data integrity.
In addition, support for transparent hugepages is included, enabling automatic organization of memory in larger units, resulting in reduced memory management overhead and improving stability for memory-intensive workloads.
Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 also includes technology previews for Oracle Linux support subscribers. The technology previews include the dynamic tracing mechanism, DTrace, which provides a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework that is designed to quickly identify the root cause of system performance problems without rebooting the kernel and recompiling-or even restarting-applications. There is also a preview of Linux Containers, a capability that makes it possible for multiple isolated Linux instances (containers) to run on the same host. Processes running in containers can have their own private view of the operating system, file system structure and network interfaces, and their use of server resources can be tightly controlled.
According to Oracle, Oracle Linux with Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel is extensively tested with the most demanding workloads, both on third-party servers and Oracle's, including Engineered Systems such as Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine and Oracle Big Data Appliance - to help ensure high performance and reliability. Oracle Linux with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel R2 has also recently delivered two record breaking TPC-C benchmark results. The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 is included with Oracle Linux 5 and 6.
More information is available here.