Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 Available Now from Oracle

Oracle (News - Alert) announced Tuesday the general availability of its upgraded version of Linux for transaction processing.  Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2, according to Computer Business Review, which is based on the 3.0. 16 mainline kernel, is optimized for deployment as a virtual guest and improves memory and resource management.

The new version of Linux also comes with the full support for the Xen hypervisor which can be used to run both in hardware virtualized and paravirtualized modes.

“Oracle Linux continues to deliver timely Linux innovations, backed by real-world testing, providing users a modern, scalable and reliable platform for their business critical workload demands,” said Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president of Linux and Virtualization Engineering, Oracle. “Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 further demonstrates Oracle’s investment in Linux technology and the community, and delivers on our goal to make Linux better for everyone.”

With this release, the Btrfs file system is now production ready and supports data stores of up to 16 exabytes.

The company stated that with Btrfs included, Oracle Linux can support large files and file systems, snapshots and checksums for data and meta-data, provides integrated RAID and volume management, and simplifies administration.

In addition, the “next generation file system” for Linux is optimized for solid state disks and includes built-in data integrity.

Oracle stated its Transparent Hugepages automatically organizes memory in larger units to reduce memory management overhead and improve stability for memory-intensive workloads.

Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 also includes technology previews of its dynamic tracing mechanism, DTrace, which identifies the root cause of system performance problems, and it’s Linux Containers, which allows multiple isolated Linux instances (containers) to run on the same host.

According to Oracle, Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 was extensively tested with the most demanding workloads, both on third-party servers and Oracle’s, including Engineered Systems such as Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine and Oracle Big Data Appliance.

Unbreakable Kernel Release 2 is included with Oracle Linux 5 and 6. For more information, users can join the Oracle Linux Online Forum on March 27. The forum will include information-rich Webcasts and “Live Online Chat” with knowledgeable Linux experts, according to the registration page.