Oracle today debuted the newest version of their Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel “UEK” designed to be paired with their RHEL-derived Oracle Linux operating system as a heavily-patched version of the Linux kernel. With today’s release of UEK 8 they have rebased atop the current Linux 6.12 long-term support codebase.
As an alternative to their RHEL-compatible kernel for Oracle Linux, Oracle engineers continue working on the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for delivering additional innovations atop a newer Linux kernel upstream codebase than what typically ships by Red Hat Enterprise Linux. With UEK 8 they have re-based to Linux 6.12 LTS.
Oracle’s UEK 8 pulls in a variety of memory management optimizations, various I/O improvements, supporting the latest Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) capabilities, and a variety of other enhancements for x86_64 and AArch64 servers.
UEK 8 also now prefers a 64K base page size on AArch64 rather than 4K, CFS has been replaced by the EEVDF scheduler, and DTrace 2.0 continues to be available within this kernel flavor. Oracle UEK kernel modules are also now delivered in more atomic packages in the name of security and maintenance.
Oracle UEK R8 is intended for use with Oracle Linux 9 as their downstream of RHEL9. More details on today’s release of the Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 8 from the Oracle Linux blog.