Oracle Linux How-To for Sysadmins and Developers

This page provides resources to help sysadmins and developers of Oracle Linux evaluate, deploy, and maintain installations of the Linux OS and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.

The Oracle Linux distribution is free to download, use and distribute. Oracle Linux Support is available if you want premier backports, comprehensive management, indemnification, testing, and more. To see Oracle's hosted Linux projects and FOSS from Oracle, visit oss.oracle.com.

You can also find more information about Oracle Linux here:

Download

Oracle Linux Documentation

Product Documentation

For more documentation on Oracle Linux, go to Oracle Linux Documentation.

Certified Hardware and Validated Configurations

Comments and Questions

Send any comments or questions about the documentation to the Oracle Linux documentation team.

Oracle Linux and social media

Follow @OracleLinux on Twitter!
Like us on Facebook and join the discussions!
View videos and subscribe to our YouTubechannel!

Blogs about Oracle Linux and Linux discussion forums

The Open, Easy, Secure Linux Kernel for Enterprise Clouds

Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Oracle Linux

The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK), included as part of Oracle Linux, provides the latest open source innovations, key optimizations, and security for enterprise cloud workloads. This Linux kernel powers Oracle Cloud and Oracle Engineered Systems, such as Oracle Exadata Database Machine. Oracle tests UEK intensively with demanding Oracle workloads and recommends UEK for Oracle deployments and all other enterprise deployments.

Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Oracle Linux

Oracle contributes to upstream Linux kernel development with enhancements that benefit Oracle Database, middleware, applications, and hardware as well as our broad partner ecosystem. These enhancements are distributed to customers through UEK for Oracle Linux.

By selectively integrating the latest open source Linux capabilities into UEK while still providing application binary compatibility with the Red Hat Compatible Kernel, Oracle makes it easy to run the most demanding cloud and enterprise workloads without compromising stability and security. We test all our on-premises software and run Oracle Cloud on UEK, ensuring you can achieve the highest scalability and performance with your current workloads and those of the future.

FEATURES	BENEFITS
DTrace	DTrace provides Oracle Linux customers with a comprehensive, dynamic tracing framework. Find and fix performance and stability problems easily and securely with DTrace enhancements like perf_events as Statically Defined Trace (SDT) probes.
Performance and Scalability Improvements	Notable performance improvements include: Improvements and fixes to NUMA balancing help resolve issues that could cause high I/O wait times when this feature was enabled. NUMA balancing is automatically enabled on systems that have multiple NUMA nodes. RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), a standard InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) protocol enables efficient data transfer for RDMA over Ethernet networks using UDP encapsulation to transcend Layer 3 networks. TCP-BBR, a feature that can be used to achieve higher bandwidth and lower latency for internet traffic can offer significant performance improvements for internet-based applications. BBR (Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-Trip Time) is a scheduling algorithm that helps to control the transmit rate of the TCP protocol to reduce buffering by monitoring round-trip times against bandwidth bottlenecks to reduce TCP congestion.
Btrfs Improvements	Continued improvements in scalability, performance and stability for Btrfs are key features of this latest release.
Virtualization Improvements	Significant improvements to KVM functionality including: Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) for AMD-V enabled. AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) feature that extends the AMD-V architecture has been enabled in UEK Release 5. Hardware that supports SEV can use this feature to run multiple virtual machines under the control of a hypervisor in a more secure fashion. User-Mode Instruction Prevention (UMIP) for Intel enabled. Intel's UMIP feature has been enabled in UEK Release 5. UMIP is a security feature present in newer Intel processors, that can prevent the execution of certain instructions if the Current Privilege Level (CPL) is greater than 0. Paravirtual TLB shootdown implemented. Patches have been applied to implement a KVM paravirtual translation lookaside buffer (TLB) shootdown algorithm.
Linux Containers	It's easier than ever to get the most out of your systems with Podman. Deploy applications quickly and efficiently with Linux container technologies. You can easily build your own or download ours from Oracle Container Registry, Docker Hub, and GitHub.
Updated Drivers and Hardware Support	The UEK Release 7 supports a wide range of hardware and devices. In close cooperation with our enterprise solution hardware partners, UEK updates deliver support for the latest hardware features and driver updates.
Security Improvements	In addition to ongoing CVE fixes, notable security improvements include: Secure boot improvements. Secure boot is designed to protect a system against malicious code being loaded and executed early in the boot process. Secured platforms load only software binaries, such as option ROM drivers, boot loaders, and operating system loaders, that are unmodified and trusted by the platform. While the operating system is loaded, measures have been added to prevent malicious code from being injected on subsequent boots.

The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 7 is the latest UEK release and is heavily tested and optimized operating system kernel for Oracle Linux 8 Oracle Linux 9 on the x86-64 and 64-bit ARM (aarch64) architectures. It is based on the mainline Linux kernel version 5.15.

Partners Support Oracle Linux

Scores of leading technology partners—independent software vendors, hardware vendors, and system integrators—stand behind Oracle Linux, the best enterprise Linux. Oracle Linux is modern, fast, optimized for Oracle and works out-of-the-box with partners solutions supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Oracle Linux and Virtualization ISV Ecosystem

Partner List

The table below provides a sample of the ever-growing list independent software vendors, hardware vendors, and system integrators that support Oracle Linux.

How to Certify Your Hardware and Applications on Oracle Linux

Oracle Linux Partners (partial list)

Contact e-mail Id

For more information on Oracle's partner program or assistance in certifying your applications with Oracle VM, contact the partner team at ol-ovm-info_ww@oracle.com.

Visit our Technology Spotlight pages to get more information on key Oracle Linux technologies:

XFS File System
Btrfs File System
Oracle Database runs best on Oracle Linux
Why KVM is winning over VMware vSphere

Oracle Linux Technology Spotlights

Oracle Linux is the only recommended Linux distribution for Oracle Applications and has been engineered to provide the most secure, scalable, and reliable solution for your mission-critical workloads.

Oracle Linux with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel provides the best performance and the latest features from Oracle and the mainline kernel community.

Oracle Linux customers have access to the most powerful commercial Linux distribution available and access to resources who understand the complexity of the applications running in your production environment.

Whether your solutions are running on physical hardware or virtualized, Oracle Linux and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel will ensure those workloads are optimized for maximum performance and results.