Oracle Ships Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6 - Based On Linux 5.4 + DTrace Over BPF, Etc

Oracle has announced their newest major release of their "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" that they continue spinning as an option for users of Oracle Linux and being the default within the Oracle Cloud.

Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 6 shifts their code-base from tracking the Linux 4.14 LTS kernel to now being on the Linux 5.4 LTS branch. That big version jump alone is significant with all of the new upstream features introduced since Linux 4.14's debut in November 2017.

Oracle is also promoting Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 6 as having better 64-bit Arm (AArch64) support, Cgroups v2 is more mature, KTask for parallelizing CPU-intensive work, parallelizing KSwapd, Kexec firmware signing, better memory management, the latest DTrace support and now implemented using BPF, support for the OCFS2 file-system, and Btrfs support.

Interestingly Btrfs support is advertised at this stage for UEK. Oracle originally employed Chris Mason when he was bringing up the Btrfs file-system and while upstream RHEL and others have abandoned their Btrfs ambitions, Oracle is continuing to support it in UEK R6 and also making it an install option for Oracle Linux 8. Meanwhile they also still control the upstream ZFS file-system but do not offer ZFS as part of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.

More details on the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6 release via the Oracle Linux blog with UEK R6 having just been announced a few minutes ago.