Oracle has released the second functional update for the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel R6, positioned for use in the Oracle Linux distribution as an alternative to the standard package with the kernel from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The kernel is available for x86_64 and ARM64 (aarch64) architectures. The source code of the kernel, including a breakdown into separate patches, has been published in Oracle's public Git repository.
The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6 package is based on Linux kernel 5.4 (UEK R5 was based on kernel 4.14), which is enhanced with new features, optimizations, and fixes, and has been tested for compatibility with most applications running on RHEL, specifically optimized for use with Oracle's industrial software and hardware. Installation and src packages for the UEK R6 kernel have been prepared for Oracle Linux 7.x and 8.x.
Key Changes:
- A new slab memory controller has been added for cgroups, notable for transferring slab accounting from the memory page level to the kernel object level, allowing slab pages to be shared across different cgroups instead of allocating separate slab caches for each cgroup. This approach improves slab usage efficiency, reducing the memory size used for slabs by up to 50%, significantly decreasing the total memory consumption by the kernel, and reducing memory fragmentation.
- A new vpda driver has been added for Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dx devices, supporting the vDPA (vHost Data Path Acceleration) framework, which enables hardware acceleration for input/output in virtual machines based on VirtIO.
- Improvements related to NVMe device support have been backported from Linux kernel 5.9.
- Fixes and improvements for Btrfs, CIFS, ext4, NFS, OCFS2, and XFS file systems have been backported.
- Drivers have been updated, including lpfc 12.8.0.5 (Broadcom Emulex LightPulse Fibre Channel SCSI) with support for 256-gigabit mode for SCSI Fibre Channel, mpt3sas 36.100.00.00 (LSI MPT Fusion SAS 3.0), and qla2xxx 0.02.00.103-k (QLogic Fibre Channel HBA).
- Experimental support has been added for VPN Wireguard is implemented at the kernel level.
- In NFS, experimental support has been added for the direct file copying feature between servers, specified in the NFS 4.2 specification.
- In the task scheduler, an experimental feature has been implemented to limit the parallel execution of critical tasks on different CPU cores to block leakage channels associated with using a shared cache in the CPU.
Source: opennet.ru
