Announcing Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 3 for Oracle Linux

Announcing Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 3 for Oracle Linux

By Lenz Grimmer on Oct 21, 2013

We are excited to announce the general availability of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 3 for Oracle Linux 6. The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 3 (UEK R3) is Oracle's third major supported release of its heavily tested and optimized Linux kernel for Oracle Linux 6 on the x86_64 architecture.

UEK R3 is based on mainline Linux version 3.8.13. Some notable highlights of this release include:

• Inclusion of DTrace for Linux into the kernel (no longer a separate kernel image). DTrace for Linux now supports probes for user-space statically defined tracing (USDT) in programs that have been modified to include embedded static probe points
• Production support for Linux containers (LXC) which were previously released as a technology preview
• Btrfs file system improvements (subvolume-aware quota groups, cross-subvolume reflinks, btrfs send/receive to transfer file system snapshots or incremental differences, file hole punching, hot-replacing of failed disk devices, device statistics)
• Improved support for Control Groups (cgroups) 
• The ext4 file system can now store the content of a small file inside the inode (inline_data)
• TCP fast open (TFO) can speed up the opening of successive TCP connections between two endpoints
• FUSE file system performance improvements on NUMA systems
• Support for the Intel Ivy Bridge (IVB) processor family
• Integration of the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) 2.0 stack, supporting a wide range of Infinband protocols including updates to Oracle's Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS)
• Numerous driver updates in close coordination with our hardware partners

UEK R3 uses the same versioning model as the mainline Linux kernel version. Unlike in UEK R2 (which identifies itself as version "2.6.39", even though it is based on mainline Linux 3.0.x), "uname" returns the actual version number (3.8.13).

For further details on the new features, changes and any known issues, please consult the Release Notes.

The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 3 and related packages can be installed using the yum package management tool on Oracle Linux 6 Update 4 or newer, both from the Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN) and ourpublic yum server. Please follow the installation instructions in the Release Notes for a detailed description of the steps involved.

The kernel source tree will also available via the git source code revision control system fromhttps://oss.oracle.com/git/?p=linux-uek3-3.8.git

If you would like to discuss your experiences with Oracle Linux and UEK R3, we look forward to your feedback on our public Oracle Linux Forum.