Oracle Releases Oracle Linux 6.5 Includes Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 3, Integration of DTrace, Linux Containers Support, and More

Oracle Releases Oracle Linux 6.5
Includes Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 3, Integration of DTrace, Linux Containers Support, and More

Redwood Shores, Calif. – December 5, 2013
News Summary

Now available, Oracle Linux 6.5 includes the innovative Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 3, installed by default, to enable immediate access to the latest Linux features and enhancements. The only Linux distribution to support DTrace, Oracle Linux now offers complete integration with this popular dynamic tracing framework for superior observability, troubleshooting, and performance analysis. In addition to numerous other enhancements, it also offers production support for Linux Containers, enabling operating system virtualization.

News Facts

• Oracle today announced Oracle Linux 6.5.
• With Oracle Linux 6.5, the latest Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 3 is installed as the default kernel, enabling customers and partners to test, validate and certify against the most up-to-date Oracle Linux distribution.
• Freely available for download from Oracle’s Software Delivery Cloud, Oracle Linux 6.5 features full integration with DTrace, support for Linux Containers, and InfiniBand updates.
• Oracle Linux 6.5 also includes new security features such as: the ability for applications to share a cryptographic data store that crypto toolkits can use for processing trusted certificates; and smartcard authentication support in a larger number of application subsystems for single sign on (SSO).
• Oracle Linux provides the performance and reliability to support business-critical workloads such as Oracle Database 12c, and is available on all x86-based Oracle Engineered Systems. 

Integrated Tracing, Consolidated Workloads, and Performance Enhancements

With Oracle Linux 6.5, Oracle brings the latest Linux innovations to the market, delivering extreme performance, advanced scalability and reliability for business-critical enterprise applications. The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 3, included in Oracle Linux 6.5, is based on mainline Linux 3.8, which provides a host of scalability and stability improvements, as well as new functionality. Highlights of the release include:

• Full integration of DTrace: DTrace, a comprehensive, dynamic tracing framework, is now part of the default Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel and can be used for real-time tracing, troubleshooting and tuning. Oracle Linux 6.5 also supports User-Level Statically Defined Tracing (USDT), allowing application developers to place DTrace probe points into applications for tuning, problem isolation and reporting.
• Production Linux Containers support: Linux Containers provide very efficient operating system level virtualization and works in conjunction with Linux Control Groups, enabling customers to quickly and easily consolidate workloads under a container and provide boundaries on resources including memory, CPU or disk I/O. With this technology, customers can isolate applications or OS instances on a given system without overhead. Oracle VM Templates can also be used to create a container.
• InfiniBand updates: Enhanced InfiniBand capabilities, including a merge of upstream OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) 2.0 features like IPoIB, eIPoIB, SRP, iSER, EoIP, and Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS), including support for netfilter, enable superior throughput, low latency, and excellent scalability.
• File system improvements: New features for the btrfs file system enable administrators to implement an efficient incremental backup mechanism using file system snapshots, set different size limits for volumes and subvolumes, and free up storage space with file hole punching. This adds to enhancements across other supported file systems including XFS, ext4, OCFS2, ASMLib and NFS. In addition, with NFS 4.1, pNFS is now supported.
• Intel Ivy Bridge Processor family support: Allows customers to utilize their Ivy Bridge-based servers as Oracle Linux hosts.
• Paravirtualization drivers: Customers have the ability to run Oracle Linux as a guest on Microsoft Server Hyper-V and Windows Azure with new paravirtualization drivers.
• Additional 6.5 enhancements: Support for NVM Express (NVMe)-based SSDs, which can be used with Oracle Database Smart Flash Cache, a feature of Oracle Database.
• The latest Red Hat compatible kernel is also included in Oracle Linux 6.5.