Oracle Linux 8 Update 2 Released, Now Defaulting To UEK R6 Kernel For New Installs

Following the recent release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2, Oracle has now released Oracle Linux 8 Update 2 as their RHEL8-based distribution with various extra features on top and even an alternative kernel option.

Oracle Linux 8 Update 2 has the RHEL 8.2 changes plus more. One interesting change is that beginning with this release, the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel is included as part of the install image and is in fact the default kernel on first boot for new installations. The Red Hat Compatible Kernel will remain available, but UEK R6 is their now default kernel.

Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6 is based on Linux 5.4 while adding in extra features like DTrace over BPF, KTask parallelization, memory management improvements, and other extra patches. So with Oracle Linux 8 Update 2 and future releases, this is the default on new installations compared to the Linux 4.18 based Red Hat Compatible Kernel.

Oracle Linux 8 Update 2 also has available the GCC 9.2.1 compiler, LLVM Clang 9.0 Compiler, MySQL 8.0, Python 3.8 support in addition to 3.6, a newer Firewalld, and other updates pulled in from RHEL 8.2.

More details on Oracle Linux 8 Update 2 via the Oracle Linux blog.