Benchmarking Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel

Written by Michael Larabel in Oracle on 3 December 2013 at 05:04 AM EST. 5 Comments
ORACLE
Compared to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other "EL" derivatives, Oracle Linux has an additional feature of shipping with what they call the "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel", a more recent and patched version of the Linux kernel over the standard Red Hat kernel. This morning we have out some new benchmarks comparing the RHEL 6.5 kernel in Oracle Linux to that of the Unbreakable Kernel.

Over the "Red Hat Compatible Kernel" that Oracle ships that is the same as what's found in RHEL, CentOS, Scientific, etc, they also maintain their own Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. The Oracle UEK isn't based on Linux 2.6.32 but a more recent release (in the case of Oracle Linux 6.5, the Linux 3.8 kernel) plus with various out-of-tree patches like SSD optimizations, NUMA optimizations, and other changes that they say offer more features and better performance.

With my last testing of Oracle Linux with its "UEK" kernel being of the EL 6.1 distributions in late 2011 and then a quick RHEL 6.2 benchmark in early 2012, I decided on Monday to run a quick kernel comparison atop the brand new release of Oracle Linux 6.5.

Various benchmarks were ran on Oracle Linux 6.4 x86_64 from the same Intel Core i7 3960X Extreme Edition system. The only change between test runs was using the Red Hat Compatible 2.6.32-431.el6.x86_64 kernel and then the Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 3.8.13-16.2.1.el6uek.x86_64.

The benchmark results in full and all of the system details are hosted on OpenBenchmarking.org via 1312025-SO-ORACLELIN55. Check it out!
Oracle Linux Server 6.5 Kernel Tests
Oracle Linux Server 6.5 Kernel Tests
Oracle Linux Server 6.5 Kernel Tests
Oracle Linux Server 6.5 Kernel Tests
There were some performance changes between the enterprise kernels for disk workloads, but that was about it from the different workloads benchmarked on Monday -- see more results from the OpenBenchmarking.org link.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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