Yesterday we released the 5th version of our "UEK" package for Oracle Linux 7 (UEKR5). This kernel version is based on a 4.14.x mainline Linux kernel. One of the nice things is that 4.14 is an upstream Long Term Stable kernel version as well as maintained by gregkh.
UEKR5 is a 64-bit only kernel. We released it on x86(-64) and ARM64 (aarch64) and it is supported starting with Oracle Linux 7.
Updating to UEK5 is easy - just add the UEKR5 yum repo and update. We have some release notes posted here and a more detailed blog here.
A lot of new stuff in UEKR5... we also put a few extra tools in the yum repo that let you make use of these newer features where tool updates are needed. xfsprogs, btrfsprogs, ixpdimm libraries pmemsdk, updated dtrace utils updated bcache, updated iproute etc.
For those that don't remember, we launched the first version of our kernel for Oracle Linux back in 2010 when we launched the 8 socket Exadata system. We have been releasing a new Linux kernel for Oracle Linux on a regular basis ever since. Every Exadata system, in fact every Oracle Engineered system that runs Linux uses Oracle Linux and uses one of the versions of UEK inside. So for customers, it's the most tested kernel out there, you can run the exact same OS software stack as we run, on our biggest and fastest database servers, on-premises or in the cloud, and in fact, run the exact same OS software stack as we run inside Oracle Cloud in general. That's pretty unique compared to other vendors where the underlying stack is a black box. Not here.
10/2010 - 2.6.32 [UEK] OL5/OL6 03/2012 - 2.6.39 [UEKR2] OL5/OL6 10/2013 - 3.8 [UEKR3] OL6/OL7 01/2016 - 4.1 [UEKR4] OL6/OL7 06/2018 - 4.14 [UEKR5] OL7/The source code for UEKR5 (as has been the case since day 0) is fully available publicly, the entire git repo is there with changelog, all the patches are there with all the changelog history - not just some tar file with patchfiles on top of tar files to obfuscate? things for some reason. It's all just -right there-. In fact we recently even moved our kernel gitrepo to github.
Have at it.
