It is very easy to get started with this and play around with the new features. Just takes a few steps :
Oracle Linux is freely downloadable from http://edelivery.oracle.com/linux. Oracle Linux is free to use on as many systems as you want, is freely re-distributable without changing the CD/ISO content (so including our cute penguin), provides free security errata and bugfix errata updates. You only need to pay for a support subscription for those systems that you want/need support for, not for other systems. This allows our customers/users to run the exact same software on test and dev systems as well as production systems without having to maintain potentially two kinds of repositories. All systems can run the exact same software all the time.
The free yum repository for security and bugfix errata is at http://public-yum.oracle.com. This site also contains a few other repositories :
Now, back to UEK3 beta. Just a few steps are needed to get started.
I will assume you have already installed Oracle Linux 6 (update 4) on a system and it is configured to use public-yum as the repository.
First download and enable the beta repository.
# cd /etc/yum.repos.d/ # wget http://public-yum.oracle.com/beta/public-yum-ol6-beta.repo # sed -i s/enabled=0/enabled=1/g public-yum-ol6-beta.repo
You don't have to do sed you can just edit (vi/emacs) the repo file and manually set it to 1 (enable). Now you can just run yum update
# yum update
This will install UEK3 (3.8.13-13) and it will update any relevant packages that are required to be on a later version as well. At this point you should reboot into UEK3.
New features introduced in UEK3 are listed in our release notes. There are tons of detailed improvements in the kernel since UEK2 (3.0 based). Kernelnewbies is an awesome site that keeps a nice list of changes for each version. We will add more detail to our release notes over time but for those that want to browse through all the changes, check it out.
To try out dtrace, you need to install the dtrace packages. We introduced USDT in UEK3's version of dtrace, there is some information in the release notes about the changes.
# yum install dtrace-utils
To try out lxc, you need to install the lxc packages. lxc is capable of using Oracle VM Oracle Linux templates as a base image to create a container.
# yum install lxc
Enjoy.