Oracle released the fifth functional update for the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel R5, positioned for use in the Oracle Linux distribution as an alternative to the standard package with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux kernel. The kernel is available for x86_64 and ARM64 (aarch64) architectures. The kernel sources, including the breakdown into individual patches, published in the public Git- Oracle repositories.
Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 5 is based on Linux 4.14 (UEK R4 was based on 4.1 and UEK R6 on 5.4), which has been updated with new features, optimizations and fixes, and has been tested for compatibility with most applications running in RHEL. and is specially optimized to work with industrial Oracle software and hardware. Installation and src packages with the UEK R5U5 kernel prepared for Oracle Linux 7 (there are no obstacles to using this kernel in similar versions of RHEL, CentOS and Scientific Linux).
Key improvements :
- The code responsible for clearing the memory page cache in the KVM hypervisor has been optimized to improve the performance of large guest systems and reduce their startup time.
- Bugs fixed and code improvements made for btrfs, CIFS, ext4, NFS, OCFS2 and XFS.
- RDMA has improved the performance of RDS (Reliable Datagram Sockets) failover / failback switches in case of failures. Added new RDS debugging tools to trace with eBPF and DTrace.
- Added interface / sys / kernel / security / lockdown to securityfs to control Secure Boot lockdown mode, which restricts root user access to the kernel and blocks UEFI Secure Boot bypass paths.
- Updated device drivers, including new driver versions for LSI MPT Fusion SAS 3.0, BCM573xx, Intel QuickData, Intel i10nm EDAC, Marvell PHY, Microsoft Hyper-V, and QLogic Fiber Channel HBA.