Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel R6U1 Prepares For AMD Milan, Adds WireGuard

After announcing Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6 back in March as their modified kernel based currently on the Linux 5.4 source tree while adding and back-porting extra features, UEK R6U1 was released today as their first major update to this kernel that can be found on the likes of Oracle Linux and powering the Oracle Cloud.

Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6 Update 1 remains based on the Linux 5.4 code-base but with plenty of back-porting and extra patches added in. UEK6 is an alternative to their "Red Hat Compatible Kernel" (RHCK) for use in the Oracle Linux environment for those wanting a newer kernel branch and extra features compared to what is found in Red Hat's current Enterprise Linux base.

Among the prominent changes to find with Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6 Update 1 include:

- Preparations for AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors, including the enabling of AMD TEE support for the Trusted Execution Environment.

- Padata has replaced KTask as the work Oracle contributed upstream for allowing more parallelization work to be done within the kernel. Padata was mainlined earlier this year and now found atop their 5.4-based UEK6 kernel.

- WireGuard has been brought to Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, similar to Ubuntu having back-ported this prominent secure VPN tunnel technology to its 5.4 kernel. WireGuard is treated as a tech preview with UEK R6U1.

- Core Scheduling is now available as a tech preview for ensuring that only trusted tasks run concurrently on the same CPU cores and no untrusted tasks get scheduled with a trusted task while sharing the same core. This allows keeping Hyper Threading active on Intel systems but with minimizing the risk that various data leakage vulnerabilities could allow the untrusted code to poke the sibling thread that shares the same cache.

- Improvements and fixes to all the major file-systems from Btrfs to EXT4 and NFS. NFS v4.2 server-side copies are also now supported as a tech preview feature.

- Support for newer Intel E800 series network adapters.

More details on today's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6 Update 1 via the Oracle Linux blog.